


A Village Raising Itself

by strix_alba



Series: after the (radioactive) dust settles [3]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Dialogue Heavy, Ensemble Cast, F/M, Families of Choice, Family Dynamics, M/M, Multi, Post-Season/Series 02, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-01 10:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13996203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strix_alba/pseuds/strix_alba
Summary: In which Steve tries to be a role model, Nancy tries to be a good older sister, Joyce tries to build a family, Dustin tries to cope with change, and Jane Hopper arrives in Hawkins.Or: some family is blood, and some family is chosen, and some family, like greatness, thrusts itself upon you.





	A Village Raising Itself

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Thank you so very much to [Aria](http://archiveofourown.org/users/aria) for beta-reading this and being generally enthusiastic about this as I was writing, which was tremendously energizing. There were certain parts of the story that I could not figure out, and their editing/commentary was essential.
> 
> 2\. Takes place during and after [Build A New Foundation.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12995853)
> 
> 3\. A note on language: Mike does not describe himself as bisexual because it's the middle of the '80's in rural America, and it seemed unlikely that a gaggle of middle school nerds would be familiar with the word/concept. Also, just generally, there are varying degrees of problematic language/attitudes around LGBT things. It's definitely milder than it would have been in real life, because I figure that once you've fought eldritch monsters, your baseline level of Intolerably Weird is probably a lot higher.

**\--------------Steve (November) --------------**

“So why’d you and Nancy break up?” Dustin asks.

“Cause she wasn’t into me anymore,” Steve says absently, eyes on the road. Then he reminds himself: brutal honesty. He’d be a crappy older friend if he wasn’t honest about the way shit worked. “I just wanted to forget what happened, and she wanted to dig for answers. She got pissed at me for telling her to move on.”

“Why’d you want to forget?”

Steve snorts. “Why’d I want to forget nearly being mauled to death by a — a thing from another world? Gee, Dustin, I dunno.”

The kid puts up his hands in an _I surrender_ gesture. Steve half-expects him to keep running his mouth, and for a moment he shifts around like he will; then he leans back against the window of the car, chin on his hand, and sighs.

It’s a blatant play for attention. Steve gives it about five seconds before he bites. Who else is Dustin going to talk to? His mom? Jonathan? “You gonna mope all day, or you gonna get psyched up to work on your pitching?” he asks.

“That thing from another world, the one that El killed, that was freaking insane. I’m still kind of mad at Will’s mom for making us bury it.”

“Hey, don’t talk shit about Mrs. Byers,” Steve says.

“I’m not! She’s a great lady. I’m just saying, _scientific breakthrough_. But also the government faked Will’s body last year, and Hopper hid El in a cabin for months, and then Will almost died, and then Hopper almost died, and Mike watched our club founder get mauled to death, and then you almost died, and that all sucked majorly.” Dustin takes a deep breath. “How do you keep it all in your head and not explode? Is it the hair?”

Hoo-boy. (Steve is gonna have to ask Jonathan about the fake body — although maybe it would be better to talk to Nancy — whatever, not right now.) Steve turns the car off the main road onto one made of dirt and ice. “Fuck if I know,” he says. “Like I said: I tried forgetting, and all that got me was a shitty breakup and a concussion.” He navigates carefully over a patch of black ice. Even when he doesn’t have any passengers, Steve tries very hard not to go over the speed limit these days.

“Yeah, but what about now?” Dustin pushes. “Clearly you’re not forgetting.”

They take another turn, this road just a couple of ruts in the ground that are hell on the car’s suspension.

(Last week, Steve spent seventh and eighth period hiding under the bleachers with Nancy, shivering in the snow and smoking to keep warm. He needed someone to talk to — about Eleven, about Dustin, about what he’s supposed to be doing now — and he had talked at her and talked at her and talked at her until she grabbed his arms, and he realized that she had started to cry.

“Steve,” she said. “ _Stop_. I can’t do this right now.”)

Steve winces internally. “Uh, you know. I talk to Nancy. Oh look, we’re here.” He parks the car at the end of the road next to the Chief’s wagon and grabs the bag containing three worn-out baseball gloves and a ball painted bright yellow so they can find it against the grey and brown of the woods.

Dustin trudges through the frozen leaves alongside him. His goofy-looking face is contemplative. Steve tries to squash the guilt twisting in his stomach over his inability to give the kid a non-bullshit answer.

Eleven comes running down the path to meet them, wearing oversized boots and Chief Hopper’s coat. She throws her arms around Dustin’s shoulders like she hasn’t seen him in years.

Steve’s heart clenches in his chest. “What are you doing? We were gonna meet you at the house,” he hisses at her. He spins around on the spot, looking out for anyone between the trees.

Eleven — Jane, now — steps back from Dustin and holds out a hand for a high-five. “No one,” she says. She taps the side of her head. “I know.”

“Christ, kid,” he says.

“You can do that?” Dustin asks her. “No, really, can you do that?”

Jane’s face twitches, and she glares at Dustin.

Steve scowls. “You shitting me?” he asks.

“I looked. I looked with my _eyes_ ,” she says.

“Christ,” Steve repeats.

~~*~~*~~

Steve runs after Jonathan Byers to catch him after school. He has to actually run in front of the entire student body to catch up to him — the guy is in a hurry — which is kind of humiliating, one of those _Steve Harrington, what the fuck are you doing with your life?_ moments.

“Jon!” he shouts, grabbing him triumphantly by the shoulder.

Jonathan turns around hard, swung by the momentum of his backpack. He stares at Steve like he’s confused by Steve’s presence here, acknowledging him in public. “What?”

“I, uh.” Steve had kind of been expecting a warmer reception. He forgets that the Jonathan in his head is a lot more demonstrative than the one standing in front of him. “Dustin.”

That, at least, gets Jonathan to look at him properly. “What about him?”

“He keeps … asking me things. Life advice. Look, I don’t know shit about being anyone’s role model, that’s not …” Steve reaches for his hair and stops before he can muss it up.

Jonathan’s stare melts into something more humorous. If Steve didn’t know better, he’d think that Jonathan was trying not to laugh at him.

“It’s not funny! What if I say the wrong thing and it really messes him up? I can help him with his hair, and girls, and stuff like that …” Steve can start to feel himself getting worked up again. He bounces on the balls of his feet to let out some of the energy.

Jonathan holds out his hands like Steve’s a, a mountain lion or something. “You’re overthinking it.”

“Am I?” Steve says. Because he can remember things his parents have said when he was younger that really fucking stuck with him.

Jonathan looks around over Steve’s shoulder. Steve glances in that direction, but the only thing he sees is a couple of girls checking him out. No big deal. It seems to make Jonathan nervous: he takes a step back and lowers his hands. Steve follows him back and heads towards Jonathan’s clunker of a car.

“What sort of questions are you stuck on?” asks Jonathan.

Now it’s Steve’s turn to look around for anyone within earshot. He lowers his voice and leans in. “We were talking about, you know. Halloween. Says he’s not doing great with thinking about it all the time. Not, like. He’s not going crazy or anything.” He winces, remembering that Jonathan’s brother is the one who’s been in and out of the hospital for the past year. “Just shook up sometimes, I think.”

“Okay. What’d you tell him?” Jonathan asks.

“I told him, uh, he should talk to his friends.” Steve rolls his eyes. “Which is kind of bullshit.”

They reach Jonathan’s car. Jonathan leans against it, apparently not caring that it’s covered in dried mud from the roads. “I dunno. Seems to be working for you,” he says.

“Nancy’s sick of listening to me, and I’ve done enough dumb shit to her,” Steve says.

“You’re talking to me,” Jonathan says.

 _Yeah, but we’re not friends_ , Steve thinks. Or — they’re only friends because they both happened to get involved in the same mess. But Jonathan is one of two people who have seen Steve at his personal best — going to bat for a couple of middle school punks against a horde of dog-monsters — and his worst — their fight in the alley last year. That kind of makes them friends by default, doesn’t it?

“Okay,” Jonathan mutters, turning away. Steve realizes he’s been staring at Jonathan for an uncomfortable amount of time.

“No, wait,” he says. “Do — do you and Will talk about it?”

Jonathan makes a pensive face, which is different from his confused face in that his mouth twitches to the side in a way Steve finds oddly compelling. “When he wants to. I don’t have a lot I can do to help. I listen mostly.”

“What if…” Steve remembers that they’re having this conversation in the school parking lot. He’s got to keep it together. He isn’t going to raise his voice or run around or get agitated the way that he seems to more easily, since the night at the Byers’ house. “What if he asks for advice, and you don’t know what to say?”

Jonathan shrugs. “I tell him I don’t know.” He hesitates. When he speaks, it sounds as though the words are an effort to drag out of his chest. “I don’t know, but I’ll find out, and I’ll do my best to help him anyway.” He looks down at the ground, scuffs his feet in the hard-packed dirt.

It occurs to Steve that maybe he’s using Jonathan the way that he was using Nancy, putting all of his stress and confusion and fear onto someone else and expecting them to help him whether they want to or not. Or maybe he’s doing the same thing that Dustin is doing to him, asking for advice from someone he expects to have all the answers, except that Steve is older and supposed to know better. He studies Jonathan for a moment. All of the straightforward confidence and purposefulness that he has when he’s fighting monsters, or at his own house with his own family, is absent right now. He just looks tired.

Steve tries to still himself. “I’m sorry for cornering you and … making you talk about this,” he says. “Thanks for the advice.”

Jonathan eyes him with an expression that Steve would give anything to be able to read. “No problem,” he says. He pushes off the side of the car and opens the front door. He pauses. “You want a ride home?”

Steve is about to accept, seize on the opportunity to not be an asshole, to accept help offered instead of demanding help unwillingly given, but … “I have my own ride,” he says, holding up his keys.

“Oh, yeah. Right.” Jonathan’s face goes red.

“Thanks, though. I’ll see you around,” Steve says. He flees the scene before either of them can embarrass themselves further.

~~*~~*~~

Maybe Jonathan talks to Nancy about it, or maybe Nancy figures it out on her own because she is amazingly, captivatingly brilliant. In either case, she invites Steve to their next study session. Steve thinks for a wild moment that they’re inviting him to a pity threesome, and panics, and then remembers that they have a biology test on Tuesday and Nancy is stubborn about actually studying.

Steve is used to doing a lot of the talking in any given conversation — he’s witty and he’s good at reading people’s moods, making them laugh — but when he’s sitting across from Nancy and Jonathan at the diner, he finds it more comfortable just to watch them test each other and bicker over how to reteach Steve the concepts that he never quite got the first time around.

“I’m cool with just quizzing you guys,” Steve says. He feels a little responsible for making Nancy snap at Jonathan.

Nancy flashes him a smile. “It’s good practice, teaching someone else.”

“Besides, if you didn’t graduate, you’d be stuck going to school with Dustin and Max.” Jonathan’s smile is less certain, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to joke about something so serious. Nancy certainly never would.

Steve snatches Nancy’s flashcards from her hands and pretends to study them intensely. “Well, we can’t have that now. I’d lose all my street cred.”

Nancy raises her eyebrows. Something flutters in Steve’s chest, still, and he looks away.

 

 

**\--------------Max (December)--------------**

Dinner is silent, which in Max’s opinion is the best kind of dinner her family can have. She doesn’t want to break the silence, but if she doesn’t let everyone know where she’s going, then she’ll never hear the end of it.

She waits until Neil tells her to pass the salt, so at least she’s not the first one to talk.

“My friends are having a Christmas party on Sunday,” she says.

Her mom looks up from her plate. “That sounds lovely. Do you need to bring anything?”

“No one said anything about presents. It’s just dinner,” Max says. She glances quickly at Neil, who sets down his fork, and at Billy, who is still shoveling food into his face. “I have a ride,” she says. “One of my friends’ brothers is gonna come pick me up.”

“It’ll just be you and him in the car?” Neil asks, frowning.

Max tamps down on the roiling disgust in her gut. “It’ll be me and two friends and then one of their brothers driving,” she says, as neutrally as she can. She catches Billy looking at her, hunched over his plate. She sets her jaw and gives him the barest hint of a glare.

“That sounds fine to me,” her mom says. She smiles like she can’t feel any of the tension at the table, like if she just pretends hard enough, Neil will stop being an asshole and they’ll all get along.

“Cool,” says Max. She digs into her mashed potatoes and she is careful not to let her fork screech along the china of her plate.

~~*~~*~~

Neil wants to meet her ride. Max’s mom insists it isn’t necessary.

Neil meets her ride.

Steve is pleasant and doesn’t step inside and says that his healing broken nose is from helping Dustin rescue his pet, when Neil asks.

“A cat broke your nose,” Neil says coolly.

“No sir. I fell out of the tree the first time I tried getting her down.” Steve looks just the right amount of sheepish to pull it off. Max is envious.

“But it was all worth it, ‘cause now Whiskers is scared of that tree,” she says. “Okay? Let’s go.”

She races to the car through the snow as soon as she’s sure that Neil isn’t going to be pissed about it, and Steve follows at a jog. She climbs into the back seat, where Lucas is slouched over and trying to become one with the seat because Neil and Billy are seriously assholes.

“Thanks for lying to my stepdad,” she says to Steve, when they’re safely on the road to Will’s house.

“Yeah, well, someone’s gotta look out for you shitheads. Now put your seatbelt on,” Steve says.

Max has only been to Will’s house a couple of times, not counting that first night when everything had gone to hell and Billy had come after her. Will’s mom doesn’t seem to care. She wishes Max a merry Christmas the same way that she does to everyone else, like Max has grown up at her house.

At first, Max sticks close to Lucas and Steve and tries to participate in conversations that sound like they’ve been going on since well before Max left California. Dustin, laughing, brings up a game that her friends played with Nancy when they were in elementary school, which sounds like a simplified version of Dungeons and Dragons, and Max is completely lost. She catches Jane’s eye; Jane gives her a blank look. Max edges her way around the room until she’s sitting on the coffee table across from Jane. “I have no idea what they’re talking about,” she confesses.

Jane shakes her head. “Me neither.”

“Before my parents divorced — before they stopped being married — we used to go to my dad’s mom’s house for Christmas. We drove down to the coast where my grandma lived, and I’d go to the beach with my cousins.”

Jane raises her eyebrows. “Beach?”

“It’s where the ocean meets the land. Ocean, the water that’s on most of the globe or a map when you look at it.” Max knows the general outline of Jane’s life so far, but it continues to startle her how much she has to explain. “The beach is sometimes full of rocks, and sometimes it’s just sand.” The beach by her grandma’s house is full of boulders she and her cousins would jump around on no matter what the weather was, shrieking when they stepped down onto the sand and the frigid ocean water pooled around their bare feet. “It’s too far away to go now, and I’d have to convince my mom and Neil to let me go by myself.”

“I ran away. I wanted to see my mama. Hopper said, stay hidden. I ran away to see her,” Jane says.

Max gives her a rueful smile. “Maybe next year. If I get in trouble, I can’t just shove people away with my brain, remember?”

Jane narrows her eyes thoughtfully; but before she can say anything else, there’s a shuffling movement from everyone else in the room, and then it’s time for presents. Max panics — no one told her! She’s going to look like a stingy weirdo. But no one even asks her if she has anything to give. They just give. Will drew her bald-headed mountains with little scrubby trees and bushes and a road going back and forth around them which is clearly based on photos of somewhere in southern California. It looks nothing like the town where she’d lived with her parents. It’s cute anyway, and it’s on real blank paper instead of the looseleaf he usually goes for.

Dustin presents her and Jane with identical dense boxes wrapped in reindeer paper. “It’s from Lucas and Mike and Will too, not just me,” he explains.

Max looks at Jane and shrugs. Jane starts to pull the wrapping paper apart at the edges slowly, so she won’t rip it. Max waits for her to get ahead a bit before she tears strips off her own paper the way that Mother Nature and Santa Claus intended.

It’s a radio. It’s a stupid, ugly grey radio, the kind that the boys all have to talk to each other when they’re across town. She’ll be able to talk to her friends without having to go down into the kitchen to use the phone in front of her step-family. She can find out where people are and go there, instead of wandering around until she runs into someone she likes. They want her to be a part of things, for real.

Max is going to start giggling or something else equally embarrassing if she doesn’t get herself under control. “Gee, another way for you guys to invade my life,” she says, feigning nonchalance. “Thanks.”

 

 

**\--------------Mike (January) --------------**

Mike isn’t going to think about the gradual process by which he realized that he might have a crush on Will, because that way lies madness. What’s important is what he does with the information, and what he’s done so far — since Christmas — is pretend it’s not happening, and then feel guilty every time he sees Will or Eleven.

Well, no more. He’s going to talk about his feelings. He’s going to get help.

Sort of.

Obviously, Mike isn’t going to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with his _sister_ , but that doesn’t mean that there’s no way to get help from her about … the thing … about Will. Mike finds a time when her door is actually open and stands in the doorway, arms crossed. “Why’d you start dating Jonathan instead of Steve?” he asks.

“None of your business,” Nancy says without looking up from her desk.

“Steve’s the obvious choice. He’s a good-looking jerk with fancy hair who actually cares about you when he thinks no one’s looking,” Mike says.

Nancy does look up at that, scowling. “Go _away_. I am not discussing my personal life right now, Mike. I’m studying.”

Mike tactfully refrains from pointing out that she can’t get her grades to go any higher, and she’s already sent in all of her college applications, anyway. He takes a step into her room instead, bracing himself. “Everyone thinks Steve’s the better choice, right? So why’d you break up with him for the guy people think is bad news?”

“What the hell, Mike? Why is this so important to you all of a sudden?”

“I just …” He can’t think of any appropriate excuse. Why couldn’t she for once just tell him, just let it be without needing to know why? “You know what, forget it.” Mike stomps out of her room, seething with discomfort and resentment. He retreats into his own room and slams the door. Stupid, thinking he could ask Nancy of all people for help.

A while later, there’s a knock on his door.

“What,” he says.

The doorknob turns. Nancy sticks her head in. “Is there something going on with you and Jane?” she asks quietly.

“No!” Mike realizes as soon as he closes his mouth that he’s basically given the game away.

Sure enough, his sister stares at him meaningfully. “Okay.”

“Everything’s fine,” he insists.

“Okay,” she says, sounding even less convinced than she did the first time. “Mike. No secrets, okay?”

“Bye,” he says.

“Just so you know: if you hurt Jane because you’re being stupid, I will make your life hell,” Nancy says.

“Go away,” he says, and she finally — finally — leaves. She even shuts the door behind her.

Mike wishes that he felt victorious over getting her to leave him alone. Mostly, he feels like someone sucker-punched him in the stomach.

 

 

**\--------------Jane (February) --------------**

Jane is getting good at Go Fish. It’s not a complicated game, but it’s easy to cheat without meaning to, and it’s important to her friends that she doesn’t cheat.

“Hah!” She throws down her last two cards. “I win. Fair and square.”

“Aw, man.” Mike smiles at her. It’s not the way he usually does when they play cards. It looks like he’s thinking about something else. He picks up the cards into two stacks and mixes them up, _ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch_. “El? I know this isn’t a great time, but I have to talk to you about something,” he says.

Usually, when people say they have to tell her something, it isn’t good. “Okay.”

Mike takes a deep breath. “I really like you. More than anything.”

“I know. I like you too,” Jane says easily.

“Great.” He ducks his head. “I mean, I know that.” He fidgets with the cards. He looks at them and not at Jane and he mixes the stack, pulls it in half, mixes it again. He doesn’t look at Jane.

“Why are you scared?” she asks.

“I’m not scared. I’m nervous,” Mike says to the cards.

“Why?”

“Because. I really like … someone else, too.” He meets her eyes for an instant and looks away again.

Jane’s stomach does a scared swoop. “More than me?” She thinks about Max on her — on her _skateboard_ , the first time she saw her. It felt like the door to the big room was going to follow her around forever, so that she would always be watching someone else make Mike happy.

“No!” Mike puts down the cards. “Not more. But … the same way as you. I get the same butterflies in my stomach,” (this is a ‘saying’ according to Hop) “and I care a lot about you being happy, and I also care a lot about this other person being happy.” Mike makes a face. His lips wobble out of shape. “I don’t want to. It’s not fair.”

Jane takes slow breaths, how Joyce taught her. It’s okay. Mike likes her. He doesn’t want to replace her if she isn’t as good. He is not like Papa.

“You like me,” she confirms. “You want me to stay. You have the butterflies for me.”

“Yeah.” Mike giggles. “I, uh. I have the butterflies for you.”

Good. That’s all good. “Why isn’t it fair? To have them for two people?”

“Because that’s not how — it’s not what …” Mike’s face is very pink. “Because people are only supposed to like one person at a time. That’s how it works. And I’m not doing that right now.”

Jane blinks at him some more. Suddenly, the way that Dustin and Lucas and Max are to each other makes more sense. If Dustin likes Max, but Max and Lucas are boyfriend and girlfriend, then Max isn’t supposed to have butterflies for Dustin. That explains why Dustin doesn’t touch Max as much as everyone else. “Oh,” says Jane.

Mike nods. “So … I don’t think I should be your boyfriend.”

“My boyfriend?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I … I like you so much.” His hands twist together in his lap. His face crumples. Jane’s chest hurts and she wants it to stop. She wants him to not be sad. He doesn’t need to be. “Mike,” she says, “Mike. It’s okay. You’re not my boyfriend.”

“What?” He lifts his head. “Wait, what?”

Jane is pleased that he’s stopped looking like everything is bad. His eyes are still watery. “You have to ask someone to be your girlfriend. You didn’t ask.”

Mike stares at her. He frowns. “What are we, then?”

“Friends?” Jane thought they had the same word to use about each other.

“Friends don’t kiss each other,” Mike mutters, eyes down.

“We do,” Jane points out. “We’re friends who kiss each other and hold hands.” (Though they mostly don’t do either of those. Mostly, they talk and play games and go exploring where Hop says that it’s safe to explore.)

“Yeah, but I thought — that’s because — you’re only supposed to …” Mike stops in the middle of his sentence. “Oh.”

“So it’s okay,” Jane repeats.

“...Okay. Fine. So we’re not dating. We’re just friends.”

“Best friends. Yes.”

Mike doesn’t look relieved like she thought he would. He still looks like he’s thinking about something important. Jane sits back on her heels and waits.

“Okay,” he says. “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”

“No.” That’s the point. That’s the thing that she thought he would be happy about.

Mike looks at her with big eyes. “Why?”

Jane scrunches up her face with concentration. They’re using the same words, but they don’t seem to mean the same thing. “You said you can’t, because you like someone else. If you like someone else, and I’m your girlfriend, then it’s breaking the rules. If you like someone else, and also like me, and I’m not your girlfriend, then it’s okay.”

“Yeah … but …”

“I don’t understand what will be different,” Jane concludes, exasperated.

Mike leans back and hugs his knees. He looks at the floor. “We could … go on dates … it’s Valentine’s Day soon. I could get you flowers and candy.”

Jane smiles at him. “You bring me candy already.” Joyce told him to stop bringing her so much. Jane doesn’t understand why. Chocolate is great. Chocolate when it’s a gift from Mike tastes even better.

“Yeah, but like …” Mike makes a face. “Yeah. Okay.”

Jane can see the start of a happy look on his face. She leans forward and puts her hands on his knees. Now he sees. “Mike. Do you want to be my best friend?” she asks. “We can go on dates and have presents.”

He grins sheepishly. “Yeah. I’d like that.” Then his expression goes — sweet, is the only word that Jane knows for it. It’s her favorite Mike expression. “You’re the weirdest best friend I’ve ever had,” he says.

“Is that good?” Jane asks. She already knows the answer. It’s nice to hear it anyway.

“Yeah. Really good,” he says.

They play more Go Fish. Jane wonders who else Mike has the butterflies for, that he needed to tell her about it. It keeps her from seeing the cards through their backs. She loses by five pairs of cards this time.

“Max?” she asks.

“Huh?” says Mike.

“You like someone else. Like me. Max?”

Mike rolls his eyes. “No. Definitely not.”

Jane frowns at him. “Max is a friend now.”

“No, I mean, I like her! She’s cool! She’s just not … someone I like. Like that.” He grumbles something to himself that Jane doesn’t hear.

“No butterflies.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

Jane thinks about this while Mike collects the cards. One of them catches on the edge of the cabin’s wooden floor, and bends. She knows that people date, or are married, when they have butterflies about each other. For everyone she knows, it’s a boy and a girl, but boys and girls are also just friends. It’s not automatic. But Mike doesn’t know any other girls besides his sister. “Who?” she asks.

Mike’s face and ears become pink again. He pulls his arms and legs in closer to take up less space. “Promise you won’t tell anyone,” he says.

“Promise,” Jane says.

“If anyone asks, you have to lie.”

Jane nods. Now that Mike is scared, she can see the difference between scared and nervous. “I promise to lie.”

“Okay.” Mike looks around, like he expects Hopper to be home an hour early. It’s just the two of them in the cabin. “I like Will. I really like him. I don’t want to.”

“Why not?” asks Jane. She likes Will. He’s kind and honest.

“Because boys aren’t supposed to like boys,” Mike explains. His voice sounds strange, caught on something in his throat.

“Why?”

“It’s not normal. It’s messed up. Anyway, I like you.”

Jane scowls. “‘Supposed to, supposed to’. Mike, stop. It’s okay.”

“I’m supposed to help you figure out how to blend in!” Mike protests.

Jane raises an eyebrow. “Supposed to,” she repeats.

Mike tries to keep a serious face. It only lasts a second before he starts to smile. Then he tries even harder to not smile, so his mouth goes all funny-shaped. Jane smiles at him. That makes it worse.

“It’s okay,” she says.

“Maybe,” says Mike.

Jane leans forward until their noses are almost touching. She stares at his right eye, then his left, then between them. “ _It’s okay_ ,” she says in her most serious voice.

Finally, Mike laughs. He leans back and scrubs at his nose with his hand. “Okay, okay! You win.”

Jane is pleased with herself for making him happy. “Yes.”

~~*~~*~~

Hopper gets home at 5:15. Jane waits until he sits down on the couch with a beer bottle. She sits on the floor in front of him.

“I’ll get dinner going in a few minutes. Just give me a second,” he says. He doesn’t turn on the TV. He just sits and faces the blank screen while his eyes make little movements towards the corners of the room.

“Not dinner. Question,” Jane says.

Hopper rubs his face with his hand. “Sure,” he sighs. “Shoot.”

“Why are boys not supposed to like boys?”

Hopper coughs into his beer bottle. He wheezes and coughs some more. He puts the beer bottle down and gives her his Serious Adult look. “Where’d you get a question like that?”

Jane can’t lie to Hopper, but she promised Mike she wouldn’t tell. “Friend,” she said. “Secret.”

“Oh, boy.” Hopper leans back against the couch. “Lots of reasons. Mostly because no one can mind their own damn business.”

Jane raises her eyebrows.

“Sorry, kid. It’s been a long day. So, uh … most boys like girls, and most girls like boys. No problem there, you know about that.”

“Like Nancy and Jonathan.”

“Yeah, like Nancy and Jonathan.” Hopper rolls his eyes. “Some boys don’t get those … feelings about girls. They get them about boys instead.”

“Do girls?” Jane asks. She doesn’t want to leave anything out.

“Yeah. Some girls like girls, too. It doesn’t happen very often. Most boys are fine having a girlfriend, or just having friends. Some boys … date each other.” Hopper makes a flat face and stares into the fireplace. “Why aren’t they supposed to … well … it’s not what people expect. You expect a family to be a mother, a father, their kids.” Jane nods. “It’s balanced. You can’t have that with two men. It’s not right. It makes people uncomfortable.”

“Bad?”

“A lot of people think so, yeah.”

It’s Jane’s turn to roll her eyes. Not an answer. “Do _you_ think it’s bad?”

Hopper covers his face with his hands again. Jane stares at him so she doesn’t miss any part of his answer. “It’s — not the worst thing, Jesus Christ. It’s not normal, but it doesn’t mean I’d kick a kid out for being queer — for liking another boy, or a girl.” He takes away his hands and looks at her. “There something you want to tell me?”

Jane shakes her head.

“Let me try that again. Is there something I should know about that you don’t want to tell me?”

There’s no reason why Hopper has to know that Mike has the butterflies for Will. Even if it wasn’t a secret, there’s no reason. “No.”

“Okay.” Hopper sighs.

Jane turns around and scoots back on the floor, so that her back is against the couch. She leans her head sideways against his knees. “Thanks,” she says.

~~*~~*~~

Jane has made a promise to Mike. She will not even try to break that promise. But there are ways she can learn without talking about him.

Nancy does not allow her to talk about things that aren’t school during their lessons. She says it’s what school will be like. She says it’s so that Jane can learn to focus. Jane doesn’t mind. She does her math and she reads her books and she learns what “U-S-S-R” stands for because these are things that she needs to know so she can go to school with her friends.

After they put their books away, that’s when Jane can ask questions.

“Mike says a lot about ‘supposed to’,” she says. “Then he looks sad.”

“Yeah, well. Sometimes what you’re supposed to do sucks.” Nancy’s expression shifts for an instant, not long enough for Jane to understand what it means. “Why? What’s he saying now?”

“Things,” Jane says. “Why is ‘supposed to’ sad?”

Nancy presses her lips together. She looks at Jane. Jane notices that she has makeup on her eyelashes, maybe. It’s not a lot, just enough to be different. “There’s … rules,” she says finally. “Not written down, not like the rules that you and Hopper have. They’re things that people do because it’s the way we’ve always done them. Sometimes they’re good things, like ‘don’t hurt people who aren’t hurting you’, or, ‘say thank you when someone tries to help you’. And sometimes they’re good for some people, but not for other people. I don’t like the rule that I have to be polite to old people just because they’re old, but I don’t dislike it enough to want to break it. I don’t like the rule that I have to look happy when I’m not. I hate that, so I break it.”

“What happens?” Jane asks.

Nancy tilts her head from side to side. “Sometimes nothing. Sometimes my mom gets upset. I don’t break it all the time, but I choose when to ignore it. Does that make sense?”

Jane turns the words over in her head. It sounds like Hopper’s rules. She can break them, if she wants to. He’s not always around to stop her from being stupid. But if she is stupid, then something bad might happen to her, so she doesn’t want to be stupid. She can also break the rule of not eating too much candy. The things that happen — the consequences — aren’t as bad, so she breaks the rule sometimes.

Some of ‘supposed to’ sounds like that. If Mike wants to like Will and Jane at the same time, then maybe bad things will happen. Or maybe they will be little bad things, and it will be worth breaking the rule. She will have to ask Mike what he thinks.

“Yes,” she says to Nancy. “Makes sense.”

Promise: not broken. Information: got.

 

 

**\--------------Joyce (February) --------------**

They’re over at his house, for once. Joyce is desperate to be somewhere besides work and home.

“I was talking to El yesterday,” says Hopper.

“Well, that’s a good start,” she teases him.

He snorts. “She asked me,” — he breaks off to stab at his lasagna — “about, uh. What was it she said?” He stares up at the ceiling. The easy mood fades away, and Joyce braces herself for awkward fumbling around any number of adolescent girl problems that a man like Hopper would be uncomfortable discussing.

“She asked, uh, ‘Why is it bad for boys to like other boys’,” he finishes.

“Oh,” says Joyce. The bottom drops out of her stomach. “What did you tell her?”

Hopper shrugs. “I had to explain why queers exist in the first place. I told her it’s not normal, so people are scared of it.” He chews for a moment, fork hovering in the air. “I told her it’s not bad, in and of itself. Dunno if it was the right thing to say. Not something I pictured myself having to explain, to be honest.”

Joyce makes a noncommittal noise. She’s had a version of that conversation in her head for … years, since a nine-year-old Jonathan asked why other kids called him a fag, and she hadn’t known what to say.

“We’re still working on, you know, communication. Talking about something when you’re unhappy. Didn’t want to fuck that up if she, uh, decides she’s … like that.”

Joyce nods. “Did she. Did she say why she wanted to know?” She wedges her fork through the lasagna, but she can’t bring herself to take a bite.

“Nope. Says it’s a secret.” His mouth twitches. “Friend’s secret.”

Joyce looks at him for a moment. Hopper raises his eyebrows. She assumes he’s thinking about Will, about whether or not her kid is _different_ , is talking about it to his friends.

And that, for all their closeness these days, is none of his business. “Thanks for letting me know,” is all that she says.

~~*~~*~~

Joyce leaves Will and Jane at home with Jonathan for the day. They will be fine. They will not answer the door if it’s not someone they don’t trust. Jonathan has the bat, and they can call Hopper at the station if there’s any trouble, and if worst comes to worst, Jane can defend herself. They will be fine.

Joyce pulls into the gravel driveway and parks the car. Walking up to the door still makes her shake with fear left over from the first time she came here. She clenches her hands into tight fists and knocks on the door.

Becky opens the door. She looks … better, Joyce decides, than the first time they met. Still hollowed-out, still too pale. Less tightly-coiled rage. She smiles now, and steps back to let Joyce inside instead of slamming the door in her face.

They take tea in the living room. They talk about Jane, first, because it’s an easy place to start. “She’s up to sixth grade math now, and Jonathan’s working with her on her reading. I think she’ll still be a bit behind by the time she starts school, but she learns so fast.”

“Terry was always quick on the uptake, too, and very proud of it. There was a girl who moved to our town when she was in … eighth, ninth grade, who’d already taken algebra at her old school. Terry was pissed that someone else knew the work before she did.” Becky bites her lip on a smile.

“What did she do?” asks Joyce.

“She — oh, that’s right! She studied ahead in the textbook far enough that she was bored to death in class for the rest of the year. And then she complained about how bored she was.” Becky laughs, hand over her mouth. “I’d forgotten about that.”

Joyce drinks her tea and listens. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that Becky is related to Jane. Other times — like now — she makes movements and expressions that are eerie to see, Jane’s quirks on another woman’s face. Joyce wonders how similar they’ll look when Jane is older.

She helps Becky clear the dishes away — not just theirs, but the ones that are clearly from last night’s dinner, and the day before. Becky tries to shoo her away, but Joyce knows full well the difference that a few days’ worth of piled-up dishes can make on top of everything else. She can help with this, at least. She can help someone else keep their head above water. She can.

Terry is in the next room, as she always is. Joyce makes sure to sit down on the footstool by the rocking chair and talk to her for a bit.

“Your daughter is alive and safe,” she starts out, same as always. “There is proof that you are her mother. You’re not crazy. You were never crazy.”

Terry’s eyes flicker up, down, back and forth. This, too, is the same.

“We’re going to move her into Hopper’s house in town after the school year is over. I’ve been helping him figure out how to introduce her to people. We’re going to move her things down from the cabin. She’ll still have a room here.

“My oldest son, Jonathan, has been helping her read. He has her do book reports, and tell him about themes.” Joyce recalls a particularly heated lesson whose end she’d walked into. “She hates some of the stories, but she does the work. She’s going to be just fine.”

She tells Terry about school, about how Jane goes out in the woods and plays with her friends and is learning to ride a bike. She hesitates before she tells Terry about how she went to visit Jane one day and found her sitting cross-legged on the sofa, hands outstretched, with Max giggling and floating a foot off the ground in front of her. Jane had lowered Max to the ground when she saw Joyce and greeted her with a slightly sheepish expression, wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve.

For an instant, Joyce thinks that she sees a flicker of emotion cross Terry’s face. It’s too brief to be sure. She swallows hard and covers Terry’s hands with her own. “She looked in on Kali again last week. One of the other girls from the lab? She says Kali looks like she’s doing well, too. She wanted me to tell you.”

Becky comes in, cigarette in hand, and leans against the door frame.

“Your daughter is safe, and she is loved. We’ll keep on looking out for her, and you, and your sister,” Joyce says as she stands up — to Terry, but also for Becky’s benefit.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Becky nod.

 

 

**\--------------Jonathan (March) --------------**

There’s a letter waiting for Jonathan when he opens the door to his room, addressed to him in unfamiliar sloppy handwriting. It’s askew like someone tossed it into the open doorway and left. He rips it open.

_I need help making a present for Will. Can you help me? It needs to be a secret. —Mike_

Jonathan flips over the looseleaf and fishes a pen from his bag. _Yes. I’m going to dinner at your house on Wednesday night. Tell me about it then._ He folds it back into the envelope and walks out into the living room. Mike and Will are on the couch like bookends, doing homework. Nancy and Eleven are in the kitchen going over a workbook that Dustin stole from the middle school so Nancy would have something to teach from. Jonathan shoves the envelope into Mike’s backpack on his way across the room.

~~*~~*~~

Wednesday is only a few days away, but the incident still manages to slip his mind. Jonathan is a relatively new figure in the Wheeler house, and he’s fairly certain that Nancy’s parents preferred Steve over him. He’s more preoccupied with making a good impression, up until Mike corners him after dinner. The rest of the family retreats to the den to watch TV together while Mike grudgingly clears the dishes, and Jonathan is stopped by a gravy-covered plate held out at chest height.

“Oh, yeah,” Jonathan whispers. “What’s up?”

Mike leads him to the kitchen sink. He is … well, Jonathan’s not an expert on his brother’s best friend, but his ears are red, and he is way too focused on the dishes for someone who was whining about doing them two minutes ago. “I wanted to make Will a tape,” says Mike.

Jonathan blinks at him. “You mean, like a mixtape?”

“Yeah! Like the one you made him. Sort of.” Mike makes an abortive forward gesture with his hands. “Is that — I don’t have the right equipment at my house, and I can’t make a,”— He pauses and looks away wildly. “I can’t use the AV Club equipment because Will is in there all the time.”

“Uh-huh.” Jonathan sizes him up. It’s kind of an odd request, but hey. Mike’s a good person. He cares about Will. “Sure,” he says. “What sort of music were you thinking?”

Jonathan knows Mike in that he’s been around the house for years; but this is the first time he’s spent a significant amount of one-on-one time with him. Mike is talkative, when he’s on the right subject, which means that Jonathan doesn’t have to do much to keep up his end of the conversation. They drive to the record store the next weekend to see what’s new that Will might like, and then they have to figure out how to actually get things for Will.

“Nancy doesn’t listen to the Cars, does she?” Mike asks hopelessly, looking at the list he’s made.

Jonathan snorts. Then a new idea occurs to him. “Steve,” he says. He knows that’s something that other people do: they borrow music from their friends. He’s never had that option before, but now …

~~*~~*~~

Steve doesn’t have the records, but he still has some other friends, who might be willing to lend a few to him. “What do you need them for, again?” he asks.

“Mike Wheeler wants to make Will a mixtape,” Jonathan explains. “Dunno why.” He has theories, but Mike’s been reticent on that front.

Steve huffs. “None of my friends ever made me a mixtape. Best I got was a _Quadrophenia_ cassette from Tommy freshman year.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe you should get better friends,” Jonathan says, leaning against his locker.

“It’s a work in progress, Byers. Work in progress.”

Jonathan glances around at the halls of the high school to indicate his skepticism. After four years here, he knows everyone at least by sight. There’s not a lot of new ground to cover. But when he turns back, he sees Steve gesturing between them. “Oh,” he says, ducking his head, and feels like an idiot.

~~*~~*~~

It takes a couple of weeks for them to finish the tape: first Steve has to bring over the records and cassettes that he can scrounge up from his friends, and then Mike needs to find times when Will is out of the house but not with him, and in between, Jonathan ends up having to explain to Nancy why he’s suddenly spending a bunch of time with her kid brother.

“He what?” Nancy asks. One corner of her mouth turns up like she thinks he might be joking.

Jonathan shrugs.

She tilts her head from side to side. “Okay. Well … it’s weird that he asked you, but it’s sweet that you’re helping him.”

Jonathan shuffles under the weight of her gaze. “It’s not a big deal.” She talks like it’s something heroic, self-sacrificing, to do. In truth, he appreciates that someone else is willing to put that much effort into Will.

“Nope. You’re sweet. So there.” Nancy kisses the tip of his nose, smiling. Suddenly, his sweater is too warm.

“I had Steve help, too,” he protests.

“Steve can also be sweet, once in a while,” she allows, “But you’re my favorite.”

~~*~~*~~

Jonathan knows the day that Mike gives Will the tape they made, because when Will walks out of Mike’s house to meet him in the afternoon, Will’s whole face is glowing. He runs around the side of the house and comes back with Jane in tow. Her face almost as joyful.

“You have a good time?” Jonathan asks.

Will lunges across the stick shift and throws his arms around Jonathan’s stomach, hugging him tightly enough to hurt. “Mike gave me the tape,” he says. His voice is muffled. “ _Thank you._ ”

Jonathan drapes an arm awkwardly across his back. The angle is wrong for a proper hug. “Yeah, of course. It was fun. You liked it?”

Will makes a small squeaking noise into his stomach, and says nothing else. Jonathan turns around and raises his eyebrows at Jane.

Jane just smiles.

Jonathan turns back around and waits patiently for Will to let him loose. All right, then. Good.

 

 

**\--------------Will (April) --------------**

Will is at the kitchen table with Dustin and Eleven while his mom is at the store. Jonathan and Nancy are home, but they disappeared pretty quickly into Jonathan’s room to “listen to music”. There _is_ music playing on Jonathan’s stereo, but Will is almost sure that it’s a cover for unspeakable things that he refuses to think about in relation to his older brother.

He and Dustin play rummy for a while in the living room, but before long, they’ve put away the cards and joined Eleven at the table to draw. She’s not very good, but Will would never tell her that. She just needs more practice.

Dustin leans over the table. “Who’s that?” he asks.

“Skywalker,” she says.

Will looks more closely. Now that she’s said it, he can see that what he thought were stray lines is actually the handle of a lightsaber, floating next to his waist. His hair is orange, and his eyes are two dots of blue. “You like Luke?” Will asks.

“Of course she likes Luke. Who doesn’t like Luke?” Dustin asks.

Eleven holds out her hand, palm forward. A baseball from the living room comes zooming in, fast enough to ruffle Dustin’s hair as it sails past him. The baseball freezes in mid-air over the kitchen table, then floats around Will’s head. “Zvwoooom. Zvwoooom,” says Eleven, deadpan, and Dustin cracks up.

Will picks up a green crayon with both hands and waves it around like he’s trying to hit the baseball with it.

“Close your eyes. See with the Force,” Eleven tells him.

“I don’t have the Force,” Will reminds her, but he shuts his eyes anyway. He swings his crayon like the world’s smallest bat. It comes up against an invisible hand. When he opens his eyes and lets go, it hangs in midair, a few inches under the baseball.

“Hey, that’s cool! Two at once.” Will would be envious, if he didn’t keep reminding himself that the price of her powers was growing up in a lab surrounded by people who made his own dad look like Parent of the Year.

Eleven lets the crayon and the baseball both drop; Will swats at the ball before it can bounce off the table and onto the dish drain. “Practice,” she says. “I will be stronger.”

“Like Luke Skywalker,” says Will.

Eleven shakes her head. She pauses and sniffs. “Like my sister.”

“Hold on a second. Your what?” Dustin asks.

“You have a sister?” Will asks.

“Kali.” She rolls up her sleeve to show them the tattoo on her wrist. Will’s stomach lurches. “Eight.”

Will and Dustin look at each other, and Will is sure that they’re thinking the same thing: _Where is this sister? Why haven’t we heard about her before now?_

“Kali, like, the Hindu goddess of destruction?” Dustin asks carefully.

Eleven gives him a blank look. “Kali is my sister.”

Will glances at Dustin. Dustin widens his eyes, _I don’t know what to do with this information._ Will frowns back at him. He turns to Eleven and her picture of Luke Skywalker. “Where’s your sister now?”

“City,” says Eleven.

Better and better. Will knows that they _will_ rescue her sister, if she’s in a lab like Eleven was, but it’ll be a lot harder to get to her if she’s all the way in Chicago. Or somewhere even further away.

“Is she, uh, like you? Special? Does she have the Force?” Dustin asks.

“Yes,” says Eleven. “Different, but like me.”

“Okay.” Dustin folds his hands on the table. “How it is different?”

Will lets him do the interviewing. He’s better at gathering facts, figuring out what information they need to make a decision.

It takes a long time to get the whole story out, but eventually, they do get it. Eleven draws them a picture of Kali, which confirms that she’s probably not biologically related to her sister (Will stops Dustin from trying to explain adoption and genetics to Eleven even though yeah, Punnett squares are the shit) and also that Kali is probably where Eleven got the big black coat that she wears all the time, and the dark eyeliner she had on when Will woke up, after they got the Mind Flayer out of him. Will feels ashamed at the relief that floods through him when Eleven tells them that Kali is running away, from the bad police, but not trapped anywhere.

Dustin and Will are coaxing out the story of how Kali … maybe tried to coach Eleven to kill one of the scientists from Hawkins Lab? Dustin keeps swearing and making wide-eyed faces at Will. Eleven looks exhausted and a little wild, but when they ask her if she wants to stop, she shakes her head and keeps on talking.

There’s a knock on the front door: _tap … tap … tap tap … tap tap._ Just his mom. Eleven twists around; when the door opens, she goes shooting towards it, chair legs scraping on the linoleum.

“I told about my sister,” she says, and something in Will’s stomach plummets through the floorboards.

He follows Eleven to the front door. His mom has dropped her bags, and has her arms around El. “That’s okay. It’s okay,” she says. “That’s your story to tell.” She shoots Will a worried look.

“Should I go?” Dustin asks.

Will shakes his head vigorously. “Please don’t.”

“Are you sure? Because I really think — oh, okay,” Dustin says, as Will grabs him by the wrist.

Will’s mom sits the three of them back down at the table. She gives them the rundown: yes, she’s known about El’s sister since November, because El told Hopper and Hopper told Will’s mom. They thought it was better not to mention it to anyone else because obviously El was still working through it at the time.

“Working through?” Eleven repeats.

“Having feelings about it, and deciding what you thought,” Will’s mom explains.

“Can we tell the rest of the party about Kali?” Dustin asks. “Now that we know.”

“That’s up to Jane to decide,” Will’s mom says firmly.

Will looks at El. She’s frowning at the table, the way she seems to do when she has something to say but is still finding the words. He sits on his hands to keep himself from interrupting her train of thought.

“I want my friends to know my sister,” she says, still looking at the tabletop. “I want to tell them. I wanted to tell you.”

“Do you want any help, or do you want to do it yourself?” asks Will’s mom. Will wouldn’t have thought to ask if she wanted help with anything. He’ll try to remember that for next time.

Jane looks at Will and Dustin. “My friends will help,” she says.

 

 

**\--------------Nancy (May) --------------**

For Nancy, there’s something comfortable about having everyone in the house all at once, even if half the time, her little brother’s friends drive her crazy. Or maybe it’s just that when they’re all in the basement, Jonathan’s full attention is on her: he knows where his family is, and she knows that her family isn’t going to bother them, so they can both relax.

They sketch out plans for what they’re going to do in New York City. His dorms will be way out of the way, while hers will probably be in midtown, so they won’t be quite as close as they are now. Jonathan won’t have his car, but there are subways and buses and taxis. Nancy spreads out a map across her bed, and they lie with guide books on either side of it like parentheses, marking up the map in pencil with things they’ll do, places they’ll visit by themselves and places that they’ll take Jonathan’s family and Mike and Steve if they come to visit.

“You know that as soon as we get there, all of this is going to shit,” Jonathan points out.

“I know, but what if it doesn’t?” she says. “Besides, it’s better to have an idea of what’s going on than to just show up and hope for the best.”

They don’t talk about what will happen when they break up — and Nancy assumes that they will, sooner rather than later. It’s college, it’s the _city_ , and they’re so young still. She hopes they’ll still be friends; real friends, not just ‘we fought monsters and brought down a government facility together’ friends out of duty.

She also knows not to expect anything too specific from the future anymore.

They put away the map and straighten out their clothing when they hear the creaking of the basement door, and footsteps in the foyer. Nancy holds out her hands to pull Jonathan to his feet, then pulls him closer and kisses him one last time before they descend the stairs.

“You gonna come back after you drop off Will?” she asks.

Jonathan shrugs. “Do you want me to?”

Nancy raises her eyebrows.

He gives her a crooked smile. “Keep the window cracked,” he says, half-suggestion, half-question, and Nancy smirks.

Except that when they get down to the first floor, Dustin is there, shifting from foot to foot and obviously not comfortable waiting for them by himself. “Hey, so, you wanna come see what we’re doing?” He widens his eyes and nods at them vigorously. Nancy glances at Jonathan, who gives her a nonplussed look.

“Uh. Sure,” she says.

When they get downstairs, all of her brother’s friends are there. So is Steve. They’ve packed their game away, but they’re still sitting in a loose circle. For a brief moment, Nancy is convinced that she’s walked into some sort of intervention. Do they think she and Jonathan should break up? Is Steve somehow not as okay with their breakup as he’d seemed, and now he’s turned a bunch of middle school kids against her? “What’s going on?” she asks.

Dustin sits back down between Jane and Mike, the latter of whom gives him a startled look. “El wanted to tell a story, and I told her me and Will would make sure everyone is here for it.”

The story takes a while. It’s mostly Jane starting sentences, and then Will or Dustin elaborating. Jane has a visible death grip on Will’s hand by the end of it. Mike looks confused and a little hurt.

Nancy doesn’t know what to think. She wants to hug Jane. She wishes she didn’t know any of this, because it is viscerally upsetting to hear Jane talk with obvious adoration about a girl who told her to murder someone in cold blood. She settles on wrapping Jonathan’s arm around her shoulder, and letting Steve shove his bare foot up against her own while he watches Jane with a clenched jaw.

“And so then El came back here and took out a demodog before it killed us, and saved the entire town from becoming slaves of the Mind Flayer, because she’s awesome,” Dustin finishes. He sits back and folds his hands in his lap. “We will now be taking questions.”

Mike leans forward immediately. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demands. Nancy doesn’t tell him to _shut up_ only because she’s in front of Jonathan and Steve. She doesn’t want to look like a domineering older sister.

“Scared,” says Jane.

“But you’re not scared of anything!” Max bursts out.

“Scared of missing Kali. Talking about her hurts.” Jane taps her fist against her chest.

“That’s okay. It’s okay to be scared,” Nancy finds herself saying.

“Yeah. We’re glad you came back to us, even though she was cool,” Lucas says. He holds out a fist to Jane. She smiles and bumps it with her own.

“Me too,” she says.

~~*~~*~~

“Maybe it’s none of my business,” Nancy says, as she puts away her history textbook, “but how are you and Mike doing?”

Jane nods. “Good.”

“Okay. I just wanted to make sure … remember that it’s okay to say no. Like …” Oh, god, she does not want to have this conversation. She doesn’t even want to think about her brother having Feelings, never mind Urges. But it had occurred to her the other day that she’s not sure Jane has ever had a conversation like this before, and she’d rather it come from her than Hopper or (god forbid) Mike. “If Mike wants you to eat spaghetti, and you want to eat Eggos, and he says, ‘well, if you really liked me, you’d eat the spaghetti I made’, what would you do?”

“Mike doesn’t make spaghetti,” Jane says.

“But if he made you spaghetti, as a present.”

Jane stares at her. Her forehead wrinkles, so that she looks very much like a cat for a moment.

Nancy sighs. She settles back into her chair; this might take longer than she’d planned. She’s talked to Jonathan before about how Jane is doing with literature: she should have known that metaphors weren’t going to work. “Okay. If Mike … if Mike wants you to kiss him, and you don’t want to, you don’t have to, even if you’re his girlfriend. You know that, right?”

Jane rolls her eyes, a gesture so normal that it’s a little startling. “Not his girlfriend. _Best_ friend.”

“...Oh. Okay?” Nancy tries.

Jane fiddles with the pages of her own textbook, folding the corners down and out again. “I know about being a girlfriend. You can’t have more than one,” she says, which is …

“Who told you that?” Nancy asks. “About — being a girlfriend.”

“My friends. Joyce. Hop. Steve.”

Nancy bites down hard on the urge to scream. _Why would you, Steve_.At least Joyce probably gave her an okay idea about the whole concept of dating. As much as she likes Mike’s friends, they’re all just getting out of the stage of life where girls have cooties. And Chief Hopper ...

“Hop says the same as you,” Jane continues, oblivious to Nancy’s inner monologue. “If Mike tries to touch me and I don’t like it, I can use my powers on him. I can punch him, too.”

Relief sweeps through Nancy, and her estimation of Chief Hopper’s parenting skills go up a bit. “Good. Yes.” She points at Jane. “You do that.”

“I don’t want to punch Mike. I like him.”

“Okay, but if he’s being a jerk to you.”

“Or to Will.”

Nancy frowns. “Uh …” Something horrible occurs to her. “ _Is_ Mike being a jerk to Will?” Because if he is, so help her, she’s going to have to … talk to Jonathan first, probably.

Jane’s eyes widen. “No! Best friends.”

“Okay. Just checking. So yes: if Mike tries to kiss you and you don’t want him to, or anything else, you have my permission as his older sister to punch him,” Nancy says to her seriously. “You should … maybe tell him to stop, first. But if he does it again, that’s not okay.”

Jane nods, and Nancy thinks with relief that she’s finally gotten through to her, they’ve finally connected on this. Because Nancy … Nancy knew what she was doing with Steve (more or less). She’s lived and grown up in the real world, she’s had her whole life to figure this out. Jane’s just throwing herself in there with a lot of enthusiasm and not a lot of experience, and Nancy doesn’t want her to end up hurt. She’s been through enough already without throwing a bunch of teenage boys into the mix.

~~*~~*~~

And as awkward as the talk with Jane had been, Nancy looks forward to the talk with Mike even less … but now there are some facts she wants to clarify. It has to do with some of the things that Jane said, and some of the things that Jonathan has said, and it has to do with Nancy’s growing suspicion that there is something deeply weird about her brother’s relationship with the girl he and his friends found in the woods eighteen months ago.

Mike is rarely at home alone at the same time as Nancy, so it takes a while, but she eventually corners him in his room after dinner one night.

“What,” he says. He doesn’t invite her in, so Nancy invites herself, and shuts the door behind her. Mike puts his comic book face down on the bed with a protracted and completely unnecessary sigh. “What,” he repeats.

“We need to talk about Jane,” she says.

Mike scrambles upright. “Is everything okay with her? Did someone find out about her?” He’s already reaching for the radio on his nightstand.

“No, no! Nothing like that.” Nancy holds out her hands to forestall a mad panic. She should have picked her words more carefully.

“Oh.”

“She says she’s not your girlfriend, because, and I quote, ‘you can only have one’.” Nancy folds her arms. “What’s that about?”

Mike groans. He sinks back down onto the bed and covers his face with his pillow, which is pretty par for the course.

“Mike. If you’re setting her up to let you, I don’t know, be some sort of wannabe Casanova …” But even as she says it, Nancy knows that’s not him. Mike is weird, and mule-headed, and steals her spare change sometimes, but he’s fundamentally a decent human being when he’s not being an obnoxious little brother.

“No!” he shouts into his pillow.

“Okay, then … what’s up? Seriously, Mike, what’s going on? I know there’s something. You can sort out your own bullshit, but Jane is my friend.” Sort of. Friend-family. A cousin, maybe. “She’s not as good with people.”

Mike removes the pillow from his head and glares at her, hair everywhere and face bright red. “El’s my friend too! Just ‘cause she’s not normal like you doesn’t mean she’s some helpless baby you need to protect.”

Nancy raises her eyebrows. “Just because she can kill a demogorgon with her mind doesn’t mean she knows what dating means, or what’s okay and what’s not okay to do to someone you like.”

“Yeah, but…”

“So why has she decided that she’s not your girlfriend?” Nancy demands.

Mike’s face does a strange, twisting thing that Nancy can’t quite parse. “It was her idea, not mine,” he says. His voice sounds wobbly. He falls silent. Nancy waits, and waits, and finally, he cracks and speaks again. “I know it’s not okay, but they keep saying it is, and I — _shit_.”

“They? Who’s ‘they’?” Nancy’s arms and back are prickling, nerves on edge.

“She, _she_. Eleven. Jane,” Mike backtracks wildly.

Nancy comes over towards the bed and sits back against the edge of his dresser. She wishes she hadn’t started this conversation. It was supposed to be an easy in, easy out, and then she could feel confident that she wasn’t letting Jane down, and she could go back to studying for her precalc final. Now her brother might be about to cry and she’s supposed to be the responsible one and talk to him because god knows no one else is going to.

“Mike, listen to me. We have to look out for each other. All of us. What am I going to do, tell Mom and Dad? Mom would freak out about Jane even existing, and Dad would tell you to man up, like that’s an actual answer.” She refolds her arms, and remembers the open vs. closed body language that she’s been taught for giving presentations, and lets her arms swing loose.

It doesn’t matter. Mike isn’t looking at her; he’s staring at the ceiling, hugging his pillow. “Promise you won’t tell anyone,” he says. “Not Jonathan, not Steve, not any of your friends from school, and especially not my friends.”

“I promise,” says Nancy. She fully intends on breaking that promise if it’s something really bad, but he doesn’t need to know that.

“It’s not just El.” Mike heaves a deep breath. “Will.”

“Is she — are you …” Nancy hesitates for a moment before she bites the bullet. “Mike, are you gay?”

His face crumples, but he doesn’t cry. He scowls. “No! I like girls. Maybe I’m just being stupid. But I really, really like — him, and El said it was okay, as long as we aren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, I can like two people, and Will said it was okay if it was just El, and they’re both so _okay_ with it.”

Nancy stares at him. She looks away, and she looks back, and he’s still just her little brother, red-faced, admitting that he’s kind of gay (bisexual? Is that the word? It sounds like a word she’s read before) and maybe-dating two people at once and …

“Oh my god,” she says. “Oh my god, that’s …” That’s why Jane wanted to make sure that Will was covered, too. That’s why she doesn’t want to be Mike’s girlfriend. And that’s why Jonathan and Mike were making Will a present, and — “Wait, does _Jonathan_ know?”

Mike shrugs. “Will hasn’t said anything for now. I asked him not to.”

“Oh my god,” says Nancy.

“Stop it! I know, okay? I know.”

“No. Mike, oh my god, you’re — you’re ridiculous, you know that?” Her head is spinning, and she _does not want to be here_ , and the secretive, already complicated parts of their lives that folded out from the Upside Down are just that much more complicated now, because of course they are.

“I know!” he half-shouts, but at least he doesn’t look like he’s going to cry anymore. “I know, stop _talking_.”

“No, you listen to me,” Nancy commands him. She shoves aside some papers and hops up onto his desk. Mike turns over and glowers at her feet. “You’re my brother, and Jane is kind of my sister, and Will is … something. I like him. I’m not going to yell at you about sin and being abnormal because …” _because I’ve had sex in a creepy stranger’s trailer while our parents thought I was at a friend’s house, so I’m no better than you_. “Because I’m not. So yeah. You’re being stupid, and yeah, this is probably gonna blow up in your face. Think about it.”

“I have. I’ve thought about it over and over and over,” he insists.

“And?” she asks.

“We’re not hurting anyone. Will is happy. El is happy. I’m happy, most of the time. We’re not _like_ you. We’re all freaks, so what does it matter, anyway?”

“It matters because — because you can’t just _do_ things like that. It’s not right. It’s not the way it works. People are going to judge you.”

But if he doesn’t care about that — or says he doesn’t care about that — then what?

_(“Mike says a lot about ‘supposed to’,” Jane said. “Then he looks sad.”_

_“Yeah, well. Sometimes what you’re supposed to do sucks,” Nancy told her.)_

“You sound like Mom,” Mike says, a slap to the face.

Nancy’s skin goes cold. She slides off the desk. “I just want to help. Let me know if you do hurt anyone, because I swear …” So saying, she shuts the door behind her, harder than she needs to. She makes it to her room and then collapses across her bed.

It takes a very long time before she can focus on the flashcards in front of her face.

 

 

**\--------------Lucas (June) --------------**

June starts off with a crack, interrupting a dream about swimming through the air over the middle school. Lucas sits up in bed, eyes open before he realizes he’s awake. He slides out of bed and approaches the window sideways — which means that he sees the wood chip flying at the glass a second before it hits.

He sticks a hand out in front of the window and waves frantically, so he doesn’t get brained while he opens it up. The morning air is cool and already humid as it hits his face. He looks down at Max, tossing another woodchip between her hands.

“Dude, it’s seven in the morning,” he says.

“Billy ran away. Wanna go down to the quarry?” she calls back.

The words are slow to filter through his sleepy brain. Then he finishes processing, and nods. “Down in a minute,” he calls down to her, leaning out the window so his voice won’t carry back into the house.

Lucas dresses as quickly as he can and grabs his backpack (radio, slingshot, a couple of rocks, flashlight, and comic books) from the corner of his room. He stops himself from racing frantically around, making his way down the hallway without stepping on the creaky parts of the floorboards. He stops in the weakly-lit kitchen to (a) grab a box of cookies and two leftover hamburgers from dinner last night, and (b) leave a note on the counter near the coffee-maker, where his parents will find it when they eventually wake up, and where Erica is unlikely to find it and throw it away before then.

_Going to the quarry with Max and Dustin, 7:15am._

His parents are pretty cool with him having a girlfriend, but that doesn’t mean they need to worry that he’s sneaking out of the house to … make out, or whatever. They probably will pick up someone else along the way anyway.

The front door is easy to shut without making any noise; the screen door is a little trickier. Lucas locks the door behind him and turns around, and almost yells when Max is _right there._

“ _Jesus_ ,” he hisses.

Max’s face lights up. She throws her arms around him like it’s been days since they’ve seen each other, instead of fifteen hours or so, which is just, _really_ nice. “Thanks for coming out,” she says. “I know you need your beauty sleep.”

“Don’t be stupid, I look this good all the time,” Lucas says. It’s still cool to be able to just say shit like that, and have her think it’s funny instead of douchey. He grins. “How’d you get here?”

“How d’you think?” Max leads him away from his house down towards the road, where he can see her skateboard stashed in the bushes. “I brought a rope so you can pull me up hills.”

“You wish,” Lucas says out of habit; but he knows that he’s gonna end up doing it anyway.

~~*~~*~~

Lucas is dying to know what happened with Billy, and why it meant that Max got to his house at seven in the morning to hang out, but Max doesn’t seem to want to talk about it while they’re moving.

They get to the edge of the quarry, and Lucas drags his bicycle carefully into the bushes out of view of the road. They make for a rocky outcropping that the party discovered last year. After Troy tried to fucking murder Dustin and Mike at their old meeting place, it had lost a lot of its appeal.

Once settled, Lucas opens his backpack and offers Max the box of cookies before he mindlessly eats them all. She seizes the box with gusto. “Thanks. Everything was so crazy this morning, I didn’t bother getting anything to eat.” Max stuffs a cookie in her mouth and gazes out across the pit, towards the pine forest on the opposite side.

“What happened?” Lucas asks. She’d mentioned it before, the possibility of Billy leaving town — but after graduation, not now.

Max hunches her shoulders. “I was asleep for the first part. I guess Billy was planning to leave before anyone else was awake, but my stepdad woke up and caught him, and …” She trails off uncomfortably. “ _That_ woke me up, and Mom told me to stay in my room until it was over.” Max puts the cookie box to the side and shuffles closer to Lucas. He hooks his arm through hers. “I heard the car take off, and I heard the front door slam, and I sure as shit wasn’t gonna be in that house when Neil came back inside.”

Lucas shivers and hugs her arm tighter. He’s seen her stepdad, but never met him in person. He doesn’t want to. From what Max has said — from what she hasn’t said — Lucas has a pretty good idea of where Max’s asshole step-brother gets it from. “I’m sorry,” he says. It doesn’t nearly cover the whole shitty affair, but Lucas figures it’s better to keep it simple than to just keep talking and risk saying something stupid.

Max rests her head on his shoulder. Her hair tickles his nose, and he holds his breath so he won’t sneeze on her. “Fuck,” she says.

They stay on the rock for a while, watching the sun rise and eating cold hamburgers with no ketchup or pickles. They talk about things that wouldn’t matter except that it’s him and Max talking together. Lucas tells her about coming to the quarry by himself when he was eight or so, and stumbling on a couple of teenagers who were, in retrospect, definitely having sex, and how hard his mom had laughed when he got worried and reported back to her. Max laughs, a little nervously, and Lucas’s face burns when he realizes how it sounds. “Not — that is not a suggestion, okay, that is totally off the table. I’m just saying, it was memorable.”

“Thank god.” Max turns her face into the breeze, cheeks bright red. “You’re cute, stalker, but … uh … no thanks.”

Lucas wishes for a very localized rockslide to just send him off the cliff already. He casts about wildly for a change of subject, and hears bike tires grinding to a halt on the gravel above them. _Salvation_. He twists around from his seat on the rocks. Next to him, Max does the same. A moment later, Mike appears, looking over his shoulder with his arm stretched back towards … Will, skidding over the crest of the hill and using Mike’s hand for balance. Mike turns around, and sees Lucas and Max, and drops Will’s hand like he’s been burned.

All of the panic and relief in Lucas’s brain comes to a screeching halt.

“Hey!” Max waves to them. She catches Lucas’ eye briefly, lips twisted in a rueful smile as Mike and Will scramble down the rest of the incline.

“What’re you guys doing here?” Mike asks. Lucas narrows his eyes — he doesn’t sound quite happy to see them.

“My step-brother left,” Max says. Her tone is different than when she told Lucas.

Mike and Will glance at each other, and make faces that say, _ugh, just like him_ and _what an asshole_. “Hooray?” says Mike, wrinkling his nose.

“Yeah, I guess.” Max shrugs.

“Are you okay?” Will asks.

“I got Lucas to distract me for now.” She shoves herself against his side, even though they’re already so close that it makes him tip over and land on his shoulder. He rights himself and brushes rock dust off of his jacket.

“What about you? What’re you doing here?” Lucas asks, with as much dignity as he can salvage.

Will doesn’t meet his eyes. Mike clears his throat. “Oh! We were gonna go climb the big maple tree over that way, but then I saw Max’s hair.” He grins at Max, who pats her head with her hands like she’s making sure it’s still there. Lucas snorts.

“You want to come?” asks Will.

Regardless of whether or not Mike is telling the truth, there is a big maple tree five minutes past their rock, and all four of them can get up about twenty-five, thirty feet in the air before it starts to get hairy. Lucas perches in a fork and watches Max climb higher still, looking back down at them every five seconds to make faces and call them cowards for not following her up. She is _so cool_ , and Lucas counts himself lucky that even if she’s talked about Billy more with her other friends, _he’s_ the one who gets the wood chips thrown at his window when she want to get away from everything.

~~*~~*~~

Max doesn’t want to go home that night, and she refuses to drag Lucas’ parents into her stepfather’s line of fire by asking to sleep on their couch (for which Lucas is secretly, uncomfortably grateful. His parents are pretty great when they’re not going out of their way to embarrass him, and he doesn’t want them to ever have to deal with Neil Hargrove). The four of them make their way back to Will’s house instead. Mrs. Byers knows Max, has dealt with her family before, and can be persuaded to let her sleep over provided that she doesn’t mind borrowing a pair of Will’s pajamas. Lucas leans against the wall next to Max while she calls her house to let them know, and holds her hand when she’s done even though Mrs. Byers is in the room and pretending not to notice.

Mike goes home around five o’clock, citing a visiting aunt and uncle. Lucas dawdles until after he’s left. He waits for Max to be less stiff and awkward at Will’s mom, and then signals Will to go into his room for a moment.

“I saw you and Mike holding hands,” Lucas says without preamble, once the door is shut. “You tell him after all?”

Will goes red. “I wasn’t going to. He said it first.” He lifts his chin and meets Lucas’ eyes.

“Wait, Mike is gay too?” Lucas frowns.

“I guess.”

“What about Eleven?”

“She knows. We’re good. Weird, but good.” Will smiles.

Lucas thinks about asking what the hell that means, and then decides after a moment’s reflection that you know what? He doesn’t want to know. Mike and El are their own supremely bizarre thing, and if Mike wants to hold hands with Will, then that’s his issue. “You’re not gonna start making gooey eyes at each other in front of me, are you?” he asks, because that _would_ be Lucas’ issue. “He’s bad enough with El.”

“Yecch!” Will wrinkles his nose. “No.”

“Good.” He studies Will. Will looks embarrassed, but only embarrassed like Lucas felt holding Max’s hand in front of Will’s mom, not crumpled-up and three seconds away from hurling all over the floor the way he did when he told Lucas he was gay. “You gonna tell anyone else? Max? Dustin?”

“Maybe. It’s more complicated now, ‘cause it’s not just about me. I want to, eventually.”

Lucas grunts. It makes sense, but that doesn’t mean he’s gonna feel great about it. “Okay.” He holds out his hand, tentatively. “I still got your back, so long as you’re not doing any weird shit that’s gonna mess with the party.”

Will’s whole face breaks into a grin. He leans in for a moment like he’s going for a hug, then steadies himself and shakes Lucas’ hand with exaggerated solemnity. “Thanks. I’ll try.”

“Cool. I’m gonna go … make sure your mom isn’t scaring Max or anything.” Lucas points over his shoulder with his thumb. Mrs. Byers is the least scary parent that Lucas has ever met, but he can’t focus on two strange things happening at once. He’s resolved the Will-and-Mike thing. Now he can go back to making sure that Max is okay and not with her shitty family. He stops in the doorway of Will’s room as a new idea crosses his mind. “Hey. D’you think she’d let El stay over, too? That way, you know. You and me can sleep in your room, and Max isn’t alone on the couch.”

“You know that if El sleeps over, she and Max are gonna either spend the whole time building a fort,” —

“Or we’ll all end up making Eggo sandwiches and getting sugar-high,” Lucas finishes for him, grinning.

“Who’s getting sugar-high?” Max calls from the living room.

“No one here is getting any kind of high,” says Will’s mom. “Chief Hopper and Jane are coming for supper at seven, so we’ll have to get out the extra chairs. No, Max, you stay right there. Will knows where they are.”

 

 

**\--------------Dustin (June - August) --------------**

Something has changed. Something specific — things, as a general rule, are always changing, that’s how entropy works — but Dustin is having trouble putting his finger on it. It’s not that their party includes two girls and sometimes Steve, because that’s been going on for months now, and things only started to feel different about six weeks ago. It wasn’t Billy, either, that’s too recent.

There comes a Saturday just after school ends for the year when Dustin is alone and bored, and Max is the only one answering the radio because she’s stuck at home, cleaning her room. Dustin thinks about whose house to call if he wants to find Mike, and the answer is Lucas’, obviously, especially since he’s not with Max.

But Lucas is the one who picks up his house phone. “We’re going to my grandma’s, remember? Mike is at Will’s house.”

It’s the way he says that Mike is with Will — as though it’s obviously the case, _come on, Dustin, get with the program already_ — that makes it click in his mind.

“That’s it!” he says.

“What’s it?”

“Nothing, nothing. Say hi to your grandma for me.” Dustin hangs up. He’s never met Lucas’ grandma in his life. A hello from him will mean nothing. Why did he say that?

Whatever. Doesn’t matter. He knows what’s changed.

This is how it’s always gone in their friend group: Will is Mike’s first friend, and Dustin’s best friend. Lucas is Mike’s best friend. Dustin was the new kid for years, until Eleven came along. After El, he wasn’t new, just deputy best friend to Mike when Will and Lucas weren’t around. It was a good system; they all had different roles to play.

This is what’s changed: Will is Mike’s first friend and best friend now, both at once. Or — something like that. Their friendship is different, and it’s shifted everything else around as a result. Dustin is Lucas’s new best friend, as far as he can tell, but Lucas also has Max as his girlfriend, which is a different region of friendship that exists outside of the previous party friendships. And then, of course, there’s Eleven, who insists that she’s not Mike’s girlfriend, but Dustin mentally places her in the same nebulous girl-zone as Max when it comes to Mike. She’s kind of a guy about a lot of other things, though, and she and Will are kind of siblings because Joyce is El’s mom now, too, so where does _she_ fit?

For the next two weeks (when he remembers, which is maybe half the time) Dustin takes notes, trying to figure it all out. He lists his findings on a pad of company stationery paper that’s been on his mom’s desk forever. Lucas catches him at it once. Dustin says it’s for a social research project.

Lucas gives him a skeptical look that is, frankly, hurtful. “You have El’s name surrounded by a bunch of question marks,” he points out.

“There are a lot of variables for her,” says Dustin.

“Aren’t you only supposed to test for one variable at a time?”

Dustin opens his mouth to argue that he can’t just isolate one variable like he could in a lab, but then it hits him. “Shit, you’re right,” he says. He flips the page over and pulls the notebook closer to his chest as he starts a new chart.

Lucas watches him for a few seconds, then shakes his head. “Nerd,” he says.

“Thank you,” says Dustin.

His new study is focused on laughter, which is an essential component of every friendship. Who makes who laugh the most?

That study lasts for all of three days before he gives it up. They’re all hilarious people, and it’s too hard to keep track.

He briefly considers asking Steve for help, but that would mean admitting to Steve Harrington, coolest guy he knows, that he’s been demoted in his friend group and he’s not sure how that happened or why. Instead, he confirms his own lameness in the privacy of his own home, and asks his mom.

“I’m trying to conduct a scientific study of my friends without them realizing that I’m doing anything,” he says over dinner.

“That sounds a little unethical, dear,” says his mom.

“I’m not gonna feed them anthrax or electrocute anyone. I’m just trying to figure out a new friendship chart,” he explains.

“Uh-huh.” HIs mom gives him a knowing look. Dustin hates when she does that, because half the time she’s got completely the wrong idea and he has to go along with it so her feelings don’t get hurt; and the other half of the time, she is unnervingly correct. Right now, she takes a long sip of wine. “Why do you need a new friendship chart?”

“Well, we’ve got Max now,” he says. “She’s Lucas’s girlfriend, but she’s also friends with — with Will and Mike…”

“And you,” his mom says.

“Right. So there’s that — I need to make a new category for Max. And I think Will and Mike are best friends now, instead of Mike and Lucas, and me and Will.”

His mom gives him the knowing look again. Goddammit. “What makes you say that?” she asks.

All of this would be so much easier if he could tell her about Eleven, and that whole thing that happened. He’s not going to, obviously. His mom would freak out, and it might put El in danger. He’s just saying, trying to talk about either of them without talking about Eleven is getting increasingly difficult.

Wait. When did it get so difficult? He’s told his mom about what’s going on with his friends without mentioning Eleven before.

“Sweetheart? You okay?” his mom asks.

“Yeah. Hang on, I just had an idea.” It’s not just that Mike and Will are together all the time; it’s that Eleven is at Will’s house a lot, so Mike is there to see her, so he and Will see each other even more, so therefore …

“I need to talk to — someone,” he says. “Not now. Not during dinner,” he corrects himself hastily, sensing the change in her mood before she can say anything aloud.

His mom nods at him. “That sounds like a very good idea. Talking it out usually helps.”

“If it doesn’t, I’m still gonna need to do the scientific thing to figure out what’s going on,” he mutters.

~~*~~*~~

Talking to Eleven is an art. It’s an art in that, like art, sometimes it’s easy and goes really well, and sometimes it just makes Dustin feel clunky and stupid. Right now, he’s teetering rapidly towards the latter.

“You and Mike are best friends,” he repeats back to her.

“Yes.”

“But then he and Will are best friends, too?”

“Yes,” she repeats. She looks like she’s wondering when he got to be as stupid as he feels.

“Okay, look. I’m gonna show you the chart. Maybe that’ll help.” He pulls out the chart he made at the end of fifth grade, when he was finally sure of his place in the party. Eleven studies it for what feels like a long, long time. Possibly his handwriting is messy enough that she’s having trouble reading. She bites her lip. Finally, she looks up and grabs a pencil.

“No, no!” Dustin seizes the chart before she can mark it up. “Here. Make a new one if you want to change anything.” He slaps a piece of clean looseleaf in front of her.

Eleven gives him a strange look. She picks up the pencil and writes out names laboriously. Dustin reaches out to correct her pencil grip like he and Nancy have been trying to do for months now. She shoots him a death glare, and he retreats. He watches over her shoulder as she draws arrows between names, and writes out descriptors.

When she gets to the arrow between Mike and Will, she stops. “I have to ask Mike,” she says.

“No, it’s — I want to know what you think,” he says.

El looks at him, unblinking. “Wait here.” She gets up.

Dustin follows her to her room, where her radio is on a stand by her bed. It’s dark inside despite the early-summer sun: the windows are still papered over. “What are you — I _said_ — what are you asking Mike?” he asks.

“Mike, it’s Jane. Over,” she says into the receiver.

“Come on, please don’t.” He isn’t quite comfortable enough with her to actually grab the radio from her hand (not to mention knowing she could throw him across the room with her mind has a way of making him pause). He just hopes that Mike isn’t available right now.

“It’s Mike. Over,” the radio crackles, dashing his hopes almost immediately.

“Dustin wants to know about you and Will,” says Eleven, and Dustin freezes.

There’s the static of someone holding down the talk button without speaking.

“Mike? Over,” says El.

“NO,” Mike shouts into the radio. “No, no, do _not_. Over!”

“I can’t. It’s a secret,” Eleven says to Dustin, which, what? He reaches for the radio.

“What’s a secret? Here — gimme — Mike, it’s Dustin. _What’s_ a secret? Over.”

Mike doesn’t answer, even when Dustin repeats himself. Fucking typical. “Fine. Over and out,” Dustin says into the radio. He rounds on Eleven. “Look, I know that Mike and Will are best friends. I know that that’s changed. If that’s all, then trust me, I know. It’s not a secret.”

Eleven looks … cornered. “How do you know?” she asks.

“Because it’s obvious! You spend all your time together, the three of you.” Dustin’s throat feels tight. It’s kind of insulting that they think he wouldn’t notice that he’s been demoted.

“No. I go to school with you. Nancy. Jonathan. I play with Max and Lucas. I have _friends_ , not just best friends,” El snaps.

“Your best friends are _my_ best friends,” Dustin says. “Or they used to be.”

Eleven stares at him.

Dustin takes a step back and leans against the wall of her room. He’s got to be the bigger person here. He’s the one with thirteen years of having a mom who loves him and wants what’s best for him and tells him to talk about his problems. El had her horrible Papa, and now she’s just got Hopper. He raises his hands. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I got angry, and scared, and I’m sorry.”

Eleven stares at him some more.

“I’m sorry for snapping at you and trying to make you talk about … whatever it is you don’t want to talk about. People change, and that’s normal. I just don’t always like it.” Dustin sighs. He just wants to know things. Why does that have to hurt?

“Do you like Will?” Eleven asks.

“Huh? Yeah, he’s my friend. Of course I like him. Friends are people you like to hang out with.” He thought they’d covered this forever ago.

“No. Like, butterflies.” Eleven waves a hand over her stomach.

Now it’s Dustin’s turn to stare. “What? Am I gay for Will? What?”

Eleven frowns. “Like Mike and me. Best friends like that.”

“No! Dude, no way. I meant…” And here, the ground falls out from under Dustin’s feet, because holy shit. Holy shit. Dustin’s face — scratch that, all of his skin, everywhere — feels strangely disconnected from the rest of his body, like he’s retreated into himself to get away. “El,” he says slowly, “are Will and Mike …” (gay for each other, gay, what is going on) “Do they like each other? Like, uh, butterflies?” Eleven’s lower lip wobbles. “Are they _that_ kind of best friends too?” he asks.

“It’s a secret. I promised,” Eleven whispers, which is as good a confirmation as Dustin needs and the opposite of what he wants to hear.

“Okay. Okay. Shit.” Dustin holds out his hands, remembers she gets weird about being touched when she’s upset, and backs off. “You didn’t tell me anything, right? I figured it out on my own. You didn’t break your promise.”

Eleven still looks miserable. “Please go.”

“I’m going. Yeah. Good idea.”

Dustin grabs his things from the table in the main room. He shoves his feet back into his shoes. As he does, he can hear the white noise of an untuned TV starting up through the now-closed door of Eleven’s bedroom. Dustin wonders what she’s looking for.

He shuts down that train of thought. His friends have been lying to him. No wonder he couldn’t figure out what was different. He hadn’t thought to put the way that Mike and Will act around each other into the same category as the way that Lucas and Max behave, or even Mike and Eleven.

Fuck all of this.

Dustin gets on his bike and pedals all the way to Lucas’ house without stopping. Fortunately, Lucas is home when he gets there. He’s not sure what he would have done if he couldn’t find the one original friend not involved in this shitshow.

Lucas comes to the door, looks at him, and wrinkles his nose. “You okay man? You look kinda sweaty.”

“I’m gonna camp out here for a while. Hope that’s okay,” says Dustin.

Lucas sighs. “Yeah, sure, come on in. Wanna help me clean the bathroom?”

Dustin makes a scoffing sound. This, see; this is normal. This sort of betrayal, he can handle. “No freaking way. I’ll commentate and tell you where you missed a spot.”

~~*~~*~~

“Why’d you stop hanging out with your old friends?” Dustin asks Steve. They’re sitting on a bench on Main Street, on the way to the arcade. It’s sunny outside, and Dustin’s friends are probably waiting for him to join them, but he kind of wants to make them wait.

Steve makes a face. “I wanted to stop being a jackass, and they didn’t,” he says after a moment.

“Why?” Dustin asks.

Steve tosses his head. “I, uh. I got into a fight with Jonathan, and he got taken in to the police station. After that … I dunno, it sort of clicked in my head when I realized I’d just beat up this guy who was creepy, but also his little brother just died, and I’d insulted his family.”

“But you’re friends with Jonathan now, even though he kind of stole your girlfriend.”

Steve looks offended. “Nah, Jonathan didn’t steal Nancy. She broke up with me.”

“And then started dating Jonathan like three days later.”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re still friends with them both?” he asks.

“Well, yeah. I mean, Nancy’s the coolest person I know. And Jonathan is the second-coolest person I know.” Steve sighs heavily and looks out across the street. The wind somehow ruffles his perfectly done hair without messing it up.

“I thought you just said Jonathan was creepy,” Dustin points out.

“He was. He got better.”

“Oh.”

“Look, no offense, but why do you care all of a sudden?” Steve asks, spreading his hands. “This was months ago.”

“Because you’re friends with them, even though they betrayed you,” Dustin says.

Steve gives Dustin a considering look, brow wrinkling. “You’re not being subtle, you know. What’s going on?”

Dustin sighs heavily. “It turns out half my friends are lying to me.”

“Yeah, that sucks. What about?”

Dustin hesitates. He trusts Steve, but there’s also intra-party solidarity to consider, no matter how upset he is with his friends. “It’s not really the kind of thing I can talk about.”

“...Okay. What type of lie are we talking about? That makes a difference.”

He wracks his brains for how to describe it without Steve immediately knowing what’s going on. “It’s complicated. I thought I was best friends with one of my friends, and then it turns out that he’s actually closer to another friend, and they’ve been hiding it from me the whole time, and when I asked another friend about it, she tried to pretend they weren’t friends like that, but I found out anyway, and now everything is weird.”

Steve nods. He looks like he’s thinking deep thoughts about it, but then he says, “I did not follow that. Just use names, man. I know all your friends.”

“I could have other friends you don’t know about.”

Steve raises his eyebrows.

Dustin deflates. “Okay. So Mike and Will have a weird friendship thing going on, and Mike and El are dating even though they say they’re not, and El lied about Mike and Will being best friends now, and I’m mad at them because they changed the rules of the party and they didn’t even tell me.” And he hadn’t known how much they’d changed the rules, so he’d been on his own, thinking he was so smart with his scientific method and his chart and everything and meanwhile, Mike and Will were _dating_ and probably laughing at no one else figuring it out.

“You’re mad that Mike and Will are best friends now, and didn’t tell you,” Steve repeats.

“When you put it like that, it sounds stupid,” Dustin mutters. “Just trust me, it’s a big deal.”

“Okay. Sure. Sorry. What about Lucas and Max? They’re still cool, right? They’re not part of the thing you’re not telling me about.”

Dustin wonders if Eleven would tell Max. She definitely wouldn’t tell Lucas, but Will might.

Then again, Dustin thought that Will would tell him if he was gay or, you know, _secretly dating their Dungeon Master._

“I don’t know,” he says.

“You could ask. I’ve been told that talking about your feelings is a good strategy,” Steve says.

“You’ve said that already,” Dustin reminds him.

“And?”

Dustin sighs. “It kind of helped then, talking to Will. We’re writing a book about it. Well. There’s a shadow realm and nightmare monsters that can invade people’s dreams and turn them into zombie spies for an Evil Emperor, but it’s sort of like real life.”

Steve ruffles Dustin’s hair and fluffs it at the same time. Dustin feels a little like a poodle. “Sounds … cool, yeah, that sounds awesome. See? Nothing to it. Talk to your friends, figure out what’s going on and why they didn’t want to tell you. Maybe they just didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“Yeah, okay.” Dustin nods a couple of times. He feels a little lighter for having vented about the whole mess to Steve. Not sure that his advice is necessarily the right thing to do, but it’s nice to have someone with more friend-having experience on his side.

~~*~~*~~

He and Will are working on their novel at Dustin’s house, and Dustin is having a hard time concentrating on the story. Every time he looks at Will, he hears Eleven’s voice in his head: “No, like, butterflies.” It’s ridiculous.

“We can skip this scene and fill it in later,” Will says.

“Huh? Why?”

“‘Cause you’re not paying attention. If you’re bored, let’s go to the next thing. I can get it later. We know what’s gonna happen, right?” Will turns a couple of pages, flattens out a new page in the notebook.

“I’m not bored. I’m distracted.” They’re at a pretty good part that Dustin wants to get right, but his head’s just not in it today.

“Okay. What’re you distracted by?”

“Uh … demogorgons.” Dustin says the first thing that pops into his head.

Will sits back and pulls his knees up to his chest, wraps his arms loosely around to keep them from sliding down again. “Are you okay?” he asks. Quietly, eyes averted, like Dustin is the one who might shatter when for once, he wasn’t even thinking about the real-life demogorgon.

“Yeah! I’m not the one who got my head scrambled,” he says. Will looks hurt. Dustin isn’t playing fair. “Sorry.”

Will shrugs. “It’s okay. It’s what happened. Want to play Speed Monopoly instead?”

Dustin can’t think of anything he’d rather do less, but at least it’s something. “Sure,” he says.

He makes it through game setup and distributing money before he bursts. He keeps looking at Will and remembering that they almost lost him, and then remembering that Will is into Mike. They’ve talked about their feelings and all that, and decided to be … together … and decided to not tell Dustin and to swear Eleven to secrecy when she’s the worst liar Dustin’s ever met. And oh, look, he’s pissed all over again, isn’t that great. “Why are you gay?” Will stares at him, eyes wide, face pale. Dustin shuts his mouth. “Shit. Rewind. Why didn’t you tell me you’re gay?”

“Who said so?” Will asks.

“No one. I figured it out on my own.” Dustin can’t shake the memory of El’s distress when she thought she’d broken her promise … and besides, he was doing the detective work anyway. Lucas can back him up on that. “You and Mike, right?”

Will had been halfway to sitting on the floor in front of his pile of money and deeds. He stays there, hovering in a crouch. “Yeah. Me and Mike,” he says quietly.

It does nothing to ease the tight knot in Dustin’s stomach. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Will hunches in on himself. “I didn’t want you treating me differently, the way everyone did after the Upside-Down.”

“Being gay is _not_ the same as having mind-control virus seizures,” Dustin argues.

Will groans. “I was gonna tell you and Mike after I’d stopped — when I didn’t have a crush on him anymore. Then he told me.” His face goes very red.

Dustin still wants to rip his own hair out. It’s not — he’s still talking to Will, someone he’s known for years, only it turns out that he didn’t know him as well as he thought. He doesn’t like this. “Okay, fine. Then why didn’t you say anything after that? You can’t just go changing the party rules without a majority vote.” What is he even saying?

“We didn’t vote on Max and Lucas,” Will says, expression settling into something harder, distrustful.

“That wasn’t a secret. Number one rule: friends don’t lie,” Dustin counters.

“I didn’t lie!”

Dustin has only heard Will raise his voice in anger once before. They were eleven at the time, and Mike had scratched one of Jonathan’s records. “You all said Mike and El were together, when it’s been you and Mike since spring break.”

“They are!” Will insists.

“What are you talking about?” Dustin must be taking crazy pills. Will might’ve been hiding shit, but he’s not going to lie to Dustin’s face. He’s not that sort of person, is he?

Will sits down hard, face still stony and guarded. “Mike told Eleven he had a crush on me. Eleven told him to ask me out, too. Mike and El are not lying.”

Dustin’s anger fizzles out abruptly, leaving him with a lot of forward momentum and nowhere to go. “Wait. Hold up a minute. Mike is going out with you _and_ Eleven?”

“More or less.”

“At the same time.”

“I know it’s weird. I know.”

“What the hell? How are you okay with that?” Dustin asks.

Will shrugs. “I dunno. I like Eleven. I’d probably be mad if it was Max, or Lucas.”

“Or me. What if I was gay?” Dustin feels left out of this hypothetical bullshit scenario.

“Then I’d be especially mad.” Will doesn’t smile, but his stiff expression goes a little softer, a little more like his old self.

A different awful thought occurs to Dustin. “Is El okay with it? She’s not like, brainwashed?”

“What? No!”

He frowns. “Are you sure? That girl has never met a normal human in her life. Not even exaggerating.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Okay…”

“Are you done being mad now?” Will asks.

Dustin thinks about it. And thinks about it some more. “Maybe. I reserve the right to change my mind. And I’m still mad at Mike.”

Will glances at him and away. “Fine.”

“Cool.”

They sit across from each other with the game board between them. Dustin tries to process the last five minutes of his life.

He gives up for now. Maybe he’ll talk to his mom about it later.

Or Steve.

(Probably Steve.)

“I don’t feel like playing this.” Will makes a face at the Monopoly board.

“Me neither,” Dustin admits. “I’m gonna go throw rocks into the quarry.” He regrets saying it as soon as the words leave his mouth, but now he’s sort of committed. Maybe it’ll be cathartic.

“Can I come?” Will asks.

Dustin gets up. For a moment, he wants to say no, just to show Will. See how he likes being left out of the party. Then he wants to say no so that he can be alone to think, to get angry, to figure out what the hell he’s going to say to Mike next time they meet.

Then he looks at Will, watching him hopefully. “Yeah, fine,” he says. “Let’s go.”

 

 

**\--------------Hopper (August) --------------**

Hopper is fundamentally not an actor. He wasn’t even a very good liar until Eleven’s life depended on it.

But her life does depend on it now, for better or for worse; and so he arranges for Becky Ives to call him at work in mid-July, harried-sounding. Florence passes the phone to Hopper without comment, for once.

“Uh—huh,” he says into the receiver, and, “Slow down, m’am,” and, “God damn it. Okay. Okay.”

He hangs up. He pretends that he’s trying to stay calm for a minute before he gets up and tells Florence that something’s come up, that he has to make a few phone calls.

He locks himself in his office and picks up the phone.

For lack of anyone better to call, he dials his home phone. Then he dials Joyce’s number, and is startled when she actually picks up.

“Hey, it’s Hopper. Everything all right?” he asks.

“Oh, yeah. I don’t leave for another hour. What about you, are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m looking stressed and busy. Any luck, Flo will ask me what’s wrong, I’ll brush her off, and we’ll sit down in a day or two and have a real heart-to-heart,” he says. He feels moderately guilty about lying to Florence, but he supposes he’s going to have to get used to it. This is what he signed up for when he had Owens make Eleven a new birth certificate and put his name down as her father.

~~*~~*~~

Two days later, Hopper comes back from looking at Mr. Kaplan’s apparently keyed-up car and doesn’t respond when Florence asks how it went, and tells him to fill out the form _properly_. He sighs heavily and slams his office door.

She follows him in a moment later. “What’s gotten into you?” she asks. “Are you drinking again?”

“‘Again’ would imply that I ever stopped,” he says.

“Hmph.” Florence puts a clipboard on his desk. “I need you to fill this out again. Half the sections are blank, and I can’t read most of it.”

“God, this shit again,” he mutters — for effect, but it’s what he refrains from saying half the time anyway. Then, “Sorry. I’m sorry. I just …” He rubs his face with both hands.

Florence pauses. “Is there a reason you’ve been behaving like a teenager for the last few days?” She sounds torn between exasperation and concern.

Hopper leans back in his chair. “The phone call I got on Tuesday, from Rebecca Ives.” The look on Flo’s face suggests it had piqued her curiosity then. Good. “I, uh. I was … involved … with her sister, for a while after the divorce. It was stupid, I wasn’t in the right place to be around anyone, let alone …”

Flo nods. Her posture is considerably more sympathetic than when she walked in. She leans her hip against the edge of his desk. “Did she want something from you?”

He thinks very hard about the moment in the pumpkin patch, hours after dark, when he remembered that he’d promised Eleven he’d be home early to eat candy and watch movies, and he realized that he’d fucked up yet again. He lets the shame and guilt come back to him, and then tries not to let it all flood into his voice as he speaks. “She called to let me know her sister was in an accident. She’s alive, but mentally, uh …” He taps the side of his head and waves his hand away. “Gone.”

“The poor woman,” says Florence.

Now for the hardest part. “She had a daughter.” Hopper shuts his eyes. “ _We_ had a daughter. Jane. Becky — Rebecca — is already strained enough taking care of Terry. She wants to know if I can take custody of the girl.”

Silence. When he dares to open his eyes from what he hopes is a pained grimace, he finds Flo regarding him with her arms folded. He can’t figure out what her expression means. “Did you know about this daughter of yours before Tuesday?”

“Terry didn’t want anything to do with me. I wasn’t in the right place, after Sarah. Jane and I, we’d just started to spend more time together two summers ago.” That had seemed like a good amount of time when he and Joyce and Eleven had talked about it. Given the wrinkles that appear on Florence’s forehead, he thinks they should have gone for a longer timeframe. “I’m driving out to talk to Becky and Jane tomorrow before I come in. See what Jane wants, see if we can figure something out.” He sighs and rests his forehead on the heels of his palms.

There’s silence in the office. Out in the main room, he can hear Powell and Callahan shooting the shit.

Finally, Florence shifts, clothing rasping against itself as she moves .”I’ll still need you to fill out those forms,” she says, but she sounds almost apologetic. (Almost.) “Let me know if there’s anything we can do for you or Jane.” She turns to leave. She is most of the way out of the door, and Hopper is starting to relax, when she comes back inside and shuts the door.

Hopper frowns at her. Florence puts her hands on her hips. “Just a thought, Chief. My son’s oldest — Rachel, she ran track in high school, works at the Post Office, I’ve told you about her — she moved in with her fiance last month, remember? Left most of her furniture at Sam’s house. If your daughter’s coming to live with you, I can see if he’d be willing to sell. Girl’s going to need a proper bed. I don’t want you putting her up on a spare couch and calling it a day.”

Hopper winces, because yeah, that sounds like something he’d have done. “Okay. Probably gonna bring her stuff over from her mom’s house, give her as much normal as I can.”

“You do that.” Florence looks him over. “People are going to notice, when you just show up with a child one day.”

“I know, I know. I’m working on it,” he mutters. He slumps his shoulders.

“Hm,” says Florence, and taps her chin with her pencil.

~~*~~*~~

By the end of the week, most people in Hawkins know that Chief Jim Hopper has an illegitimate daughter whose mother is mentally incompetent (or in a coma, or dead, depending on how far along the gossip chain they were when they heard about it) and that she’s moving to Hawkins in August. God bless Florence, Hopper thinks to himself. He gets multiple offers of childcare help, secondhand clothing, and prayers. He also gets his fair share of sideways looks and whispers. Joyce relays what she hears from people at the store as they stand in line at her register. She tells him that the focus is on him and his poor judgment, and the people she’s heard talk about Jane have mostly been sympathetic to her for having gone through such a tragedy.

So far, so good.

~~*~~*~~

It’s a hell of a lot easier to arrange a day for everyone to meet during the summer than it had been for Christmas. They’re still in Joyce’s house, even though it can barely fit everyone and it’s a nice day outside.

Once they’ve assembled, Hopper stands up and surveys his allies: half a dozen children, three older teenagers, and a woman who deserved a lot better than the life she’d been handed.

“I know it’s been a long year. I’m grateful to all of you for helping us get ready for … the rest of it. Joyce — Mrs. Byers and I are gonna go over what’ll happen when Jane moves from the cabin next week. We’re gonna keep things quiet.” Jane looks up at him, practically beaming, and Hopper’s heart does the awful squeezing thing that it tends to do when she’s happy with him.

 

 

**\--------------Dustin (August) --------------**

Mike shows up at Dustin’s house a week after their meeting about Jane, fifteen days since he talked to Will. He asks if Dustin wants to go check out the tree by the Cooper farm that fell during the thunderstorm the other night.

“Uh, no thanks. I’ve got to, uh, go grocery shopping with my mom,” Dustin says.

Mike raises his eyebrows. “The whole day?”

“Yeah. It’s a mother-son bonding thing.” Dustin looks at Mike’s bangs to avoid meeting his eyes directly.

“Okay, so do you want to go on Thursday?” Mike asks. “You could have dinner at my house before D&D.”

“I’m, uh, I’m tutoring El on Thursday, remember?”

“You’re not doing math until Friday. I already asked El. Why are you avoiding me?”

Dustin makes his best _what are you accusing me of?_ face. “Why would I be avoiding you?”

“I dunno? Maybe I accidentally stepped on a bug you wanted to study.”

Dustin points at him. “No. I would not bottle that up. If you stepped on my science project, you would know.”

“Okay, so …. What is it then? You’ve been acting really weird for a while now.”

Dustin sighs. He’s not sure he’s ready to talk to Mike yet. With all their other friends around, it’s easier to shove it into the back of his mind. When it’s just Mike, there’s nothing to stop him from remembering that holy shit, Mike is dating _Will_ and also Eleven, and they’re all just fine with this and fine with not telling Dustin any of it.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We need to be on the same team. You’re the one who made me and Lucas make up when we had that fight last year about El, remember? Come on, man.”

“Fine. I’ll go see the tree with you after lunch.” Give him a little time to sort out what he’s going to say. “I’ll tell my mom we don’t need to spend all day counting green beans.” He’s hoping Mike will realize that he’s basically admitting to having exaggerated, and they can leave it at that.

Dustin makes sure to get to their meet-up point at the quarry before Mike, so that he can be cool and composed instead of uncomfortably sweaty and panting from the sun on the bike ride over. He still doesn’t known exactly what he’s going to say, but he’s historically been pretty good at winging it.

Mike looks surprised but pleased to see him already when he pulls up a few minutes later, hair flattened by sweat. They don’t talk on the ride over, saving their energy. They pass a few cars on the road, no one important, and when they get to the edge of the Cooper farm, they walk their bikes into the bushes and proceed on foot.

The tree is a pine that’s got to be a couple hundred years old. It took its roots and a good chunk of the ditch wall with it when it fell, and now there’s a jagged semicircle of root and dirt and ferns rising up ten feet out from the ground. Dustin temporarily forgets his mission to Say Something To Mike Already when he realizes that the ground ripped up by the roots left a nifty cave in the side of the embankment.

“Shit,” he says, grinning.

“Told you.” Mike jumps down into the ditch. Muddy leaves of autumns past splat under his sneakers.

They explore around the base of the tree, and determine that the roots aren’t sturdy enough for them to climb up, and find a good number of efts in the ditch. The sensation of cupping their little amphibian bodies in his dirty hands, splayed feet clinging to him and tails swinging for balance, nauseates Dustin now, even though it never did before. He puts his eft carefully back onto a rock near a mud puddle and goes to investigate the situation in the branches. They talk about the tree, and about the storm that felled it, and it’s good. It’s almost like things were before.

(Mike has been lying to him for months. Mike is kind-of-probably gay, at least for Will. Things aren’t the way they were before. They just aren’t.)

A while into their exploration — he didn’t check his watch when they arrived, but it’s got to have been at least an hour — they’re covered in patches of sap and draped among the branches. Dustin sits on the trunk with his back against a branch, steeling himself to talk, and Mike balances between two branches a foot or two higher than him. The air is as calm as it can be in the summer; which is to say, there’s a lot of bugs, some squirrels, and a car or two on the road, and that’s it. Dustin swats away one of the many gnats investigating the sap on his shoulders.

“Can we talk now?” Mike asks. “About why you’re mad at me.”

Dustin knows it’s time. He’s going to just get pointlessly worked up otherwise, and go home feeling awful. “You were right. I’m avoiding you,” he says.

The branches rustle by his head as Mike turns towards him. “Why’d you lie?”

He sounds hurt, and so — dumb and confused. “Because I’m pissed at you. Why did you lie?” Dustin asks.

“What are you talking about?”

He’s still playing dumb. Unbelievable. Dustin twists around so they’re facing each other. “I talked to Eleven, and I talked to Will. I know.” Mike’s face goes pale. “You’re my friends and you lied to me. You made El lie to me.” That part is especially shitty.

“Because you wouldn’t get it,” Mike says.

“Bullshit.”

“It’s complicated.”

“I don’t care. I’m mad that you didn’t tell me you’re queer, or that you liked Will, or that Will liked you, or that you and Will and Eleven have some sort of thing going on, and I’m mad that you kept not telling me for months while I went around like an idiot trying to figure out what was going on!” He’d wanted to be calm about this, instead of getting overheated and yelling in the woods. So much for that plan.

“I’m sorry. I’ll try to explain — I’ll try. Please.” Mike holds up his hands.

Dustin raises his hand like he’s in school. “Okay, so to start with, why? Why are you making things so much more complicated than they need to be? Are our lives somehow not complicated enough for you?”

Mike frowns. “It’s not ‘our’ lives, it’s mine. And I like them. A lot.”

“It’s ‘our’ lives because we’re all in this together. It’s _my_ life ‘cause you don’t trust me enough to tell me things, and you didn’t used to hide shit from me,” Dustin argues.

“It wasn’t because of you. We’ve barely said anything to anyone.”

“Who’d you tell, then?” Dustin says. _Who did you trust more than me?_ Dustin thinks.

Mike grimaces. “Nancy first — that was a big mistake. Will told Jonathan a couple weeks ago. Jonathan says he doesn’t care, except that now he gives me these _looks_ when I’m at his house. Like a dad with a shotgun. Lucas only knows because,” —

“ _Lucas?_ ” Dustin’s ears ring.

“He only knows because he saw us holding hands,” Mike says quickly. “I hate not being able to do anything with Will. Like, together. I can with El after the summer’s over, once she’s Hopper’s daughter; but I’ll never be able to do that with Will. So I thought, maybe if we got up really early, we could go to the quarry and, I don’t know, pretend to be normal. Only that was the day that Billy ran away, so Lucas was already there with Max.”

“Okay,” Dustin allows, “But once Lucas knew, why didn’t you tell me, too?”

“It’s not that easy, don’t you get it?” There’s a snap, and a twig goes tumbling from Mike’s hands to the ground. “It’s hard to talk about, and it’s weird, and I’m — I’m scared. I’m scared of what happens if people find out about me and Will and El. I didn’t want to lose you guys, or make things weird, by telling everyone about how much of a queer I am.” He spits out the word.

Dustin lets the words swirl around his head and settle down into his stomach, taking the edge off his own panicked, unsettled anger. Mike being scared of people is nearly unbelievable. He’s never backed down from anything before, and he’s never admitted to being afraid of anything less than an actual extra-dimensional nightmare, which is a whole other ball game. “So why’d you start anything at all, if you’re scared?” Dustin asks.

“I wanted to be happy,” Mike says quietly. “Everything is so complicated and so — so fucked up anyway. I might as well try to be happy.”

Dustin can’t help himself. “How does being kind of gay make you happy? How does being afraid of telling your friends something this big make you happy?”

“Will makes me happy more than you knowing makes me scared. But it’s still a lot.” Mike’s face is red now. He shuffles around in the branches to find a more comfortable position, sliding up a little higher.

“Does he make you happier than Eleven?” The words sound all kinds of wrong in his mouth. Their whole group would still be off-kilter, if Mike and Will were secretly dating, but it would be a little less bizarre.

Mike scowls. “That’s a dumb question. He’s different than Eleven."

Dustin groans. “I hate this,” he says. “I just want things to be a normal amount of insane.”

Mike says nothing. The woods buzz. Dustin can match some sounds to the names of the creatures responsible for them: crickets, grasshoppers, a woodpecker. Others are identifiable only as a familiar noise from the backgrounds of summers. _They’re_ the same as always. They don’t have to worry about their friends being strange. (They do have to worry about being eaten by other animals. It’s probably like being hunted by demodogs all the time. Dustin shudders.)

“I wanted things to stay the same for us. Why couldn’t it be the party like always, and then me and Will and El?” Mike asks.

Finally: a question that Dustin and his dumb research project can answer. “It’s ‘cause it’s the three of you. You and El are already crazy. And you and Will are another kind of weird. You put both together at once, and boom!” Dustin claps his hands together for effect. “Synergistic freak explosion for all of us. You can’t just pretend there’s no explosion, Mike.”

“Why does there have to be an explosion?” Mike frowns at nothing, the corners of his mouth turned down.

“Because you’re all in the party, you nimrod. You can’t just change one thing. Everything else changes to, to make room for it. No one said anything, but I knew something was different. I just didn’t know what, for months. It sucked.” Dustin’s stomach is twisted into all kinds of knots as he speaks.

“Oh,” says Mike. Dustin can see him chewing on the inside of his cheek, face puckering strangely. “I’m sorry for that. I guess I could’ve tried harder.”

“Yeah, you kind of fucked that one up,” Dustin says. He wraps an arm around the branch behind him and rests his chin on his wrist. so he can look at Mike, even though he really doesn’t want to. Mike catches his eye and glances away. Dustin sighs heavily. “I don’t like that you and Will are gay. It’s not — it changes everything.”

Mike swallows. “I know.” He sounds miserable.

On the other hand, Dustin doesn’t want him to be _miserable_. He just wants Mike to not date Will, and he wants Mike to not want to date Will because it would be easier for their whole weird family. He wants to bang his head against something, but the closest surface is the sticky and very hard bark of the pine tree. He settles for tucking in his chin and resting his forehead on his arm instead, so that all he can see is the trunk on which he sits.

“I made a chart when I was ten or eleven,” he says. “It had you, me, Lucas, and Will. I figured out who was best friends with who, and what kind of friends we all were with each other.”

“Why?” Mike asks.

Dustin shrugs. “I still felt like the new kid.” Mike doesn’t answer, which he takes as his cue to keep talking. “It’s been pretty consistent since then, until a couple months ago. And then at the end of July, I asked El to fill in what she thought everyone was.”

“That was why you guys called me?”

Dustin doesn’t lift his head. “Yep.” He kicks his feet, bouncing the tree trunk gently with the motion. Pine needles rain down on his head (where they will probably stay no matter how many showers he takes, and he’ll still be finding bits of tree in his hair come September). “See, I couldn’t figure out what to do with you and Will. But it makes sense now — he’s in the same category as Eleven and Max, but only for you. I’m gonna have to rework the whole thing.”

“You can’t do that,” Mike says. “What if someone else sees it? You can’t — please.”

Dustin can hear the panic in his voice. It’s _weird_. “What if I write it in code? There’s a book at the library about making your own codes and ciphers. I’ll use that. If that’s okay.”

“I ... guess that’s not as bad,” Mike says. He slides down out of his perch and back onto the trunk of the tree. The whole thing sways. Dustin lifts his head and blinks as his eyes adjust to full sunlight. He looks at Mike, who is different even if he’s told Dustin the truth now.

“We’re still friends, right?” Mike asks. “It’s okay, if I’m — the way I am? With our friends?”

It hadn’t even occurred to Dustin that they might not be friends after this. It’s an impossibility. Even if they argued — even if the sight of Mike had made him angry forever — they’d still be friends. With the sort of shit they’ve been through together, they’d still be something.

It’s going to take some getting used to, this new arrangement: where he and Will might be best friends, but Mike is Will’s boyfriend (gross); where El and Will and Mike are their own weird triangle and Lucas and Max are boyfriend and girlfriend and Dustin just has a lot of friends in a mostly-normal sort of way.

“Give me like a week to wrap my head around it. It’s not the end of the world, it’s just — like you said. It’s a lot.”

Mike nods. “It took me months to figure out that maybe I had a crush on Will, and then weeks to figure out what kind of a crush it was. And that was me telling myself something that I already felt.”

“Please don’t tell me about having a crush on Will.” The phrase sounds bizarre coming out of his own mouth.

“You think you can get used to it?” Mike asks. His expression is wry, but he sounds genuinely worried.

Dustin sighs. He unwinds his arms from around the tree and pushes himself up so he’s level with Mike. “Probably. Like a boiling frog. Just keep slowly ramping up how gay you act.”

Mike snorts. “Fuck you.”

Dustin raises his eyebrows aggressively, as high as they’ll go.

They sit in the tree for a while more. Dustin traces the path of the branch closest to him with his eyes, until he gets lost in the clusters of needles and pine cones out at the end. Mike walks carefully up the trunk of the tree. Dustin has to cling to the branches with increasingly tacky hands to keep his balance.

Mike comes wandering back a few minutes later, covered in little bits of bark. He takes a deep breath. “I want to be friends like before. I don’t think we can be, exactly, but I want to try. I promise, I won’t lie to you. Even if it’s something you’re gonna think is gross.”

“Friends don’t lie,” Dustin says.

“Yeah. Friends don’t lie,” Mike repeats.

It feels like Dustin is supposed to apologize for being mad now, but he’s not sorry, and he doesn’t think he should be. He says as much.

“Okay.” Mike shrugs.

“I _am_ sorry for trying to do a sociological study instead of just asking you guys in the first place,” Dustin says.

Mike sits down next to him. Several pine cones drop off the branches behind them. “What study?” he asks.

“I started on it back in June. I knew something had changed, but I couldn’t figure out what, so I started thinking about how to quantify it so I could see the patterns …” Dustin explains his study — his multiple failed attempts at studies. Mike listens. He interrupts to poke holes in Dustin’s methodology, and Dustin argues that of course it looks obvious in hindsight, but Mike had all of the information and Dustin didn’t.

“Well, now you do, too,” Mike argues right back.

Dustin shakes his head. “New idea: how about we ditch the experiment and go get out the cipher book from the library? My card’s full, we’ll have to use yours.”

Mike groans. “You’re gonna owe me for your late fines.”

“That’s one thing that hasn’t changed,” Dustin says, and is rewarded by a small, tentative smile. He capitalizes on it by patting Mike on the shoulder. The fabric of his t-shirt sticks to Dustin’s hands. Mike snorts. Dustin drags his other hand along a sticky patch of bark near his knees and reaches for Mike’s head, fingers splayed.

“Ack, gross!” Mike wrenches himself away and clambers out of the fallen tree, laughing. Dustin pursues him with sappy, gritty hands (and arms, and knees, and hair). They race to their bikes, shoving each other, and make their way out of the woods together.

 

 

**\--------------Max (August) --------------**

On August tenth, Max stations herself at the arcade with five dollars in quarters in her pocket (courtesy of Chief Hopper, Steve Harrington, and the spare change she scrounged from Billy’s mostly-untouched room last month). She’s outside eating ten-cent soft serve at noon, as they’d discussed, watching the sidewalk.

A minute or two later, she catches movement out of the corner of her eye. Jane rolls into view on the skateboard that Max helped Chief Hopper buy for her last week. She has her hair slicked back, a black Stray Cats t-shirt on over a pink skirt that has to have belonged to Mike’s older sister. Somehow, the combination manages to look cool on her. Max wants to stare at her until she understand how she’s doing it.

Jane skates into the parking lot, swerves around a couple of kids the way Max practiced with her, and kicks up the board into her hand when she reaches the stairs. Max looks around. There’s a couple of people looking at Jane: the kids she went past in the lot, and two older teenagers smoking against the side of the building. Excellent.

Jane walks up the stairs and nods at Max. She’s wearing eyeliner. Of course she is. Max thinks that if she ever met Jane’s sister, she might spontaneously combust with envy.

“Hey,” says Jane.

Max grins. Past Jane’s shoulder, the two teenagers watch them curiously. “Wanna go kick some ass at Donkey Kong?” she asks.

Jane’s eyes light up, and she smiles. The badass rocker look immediately falls away. “Yes!”

Jane’s never played Donkey Kong before. Jane’s never been inside an arcade before. Max gets to be the one to show her how to do those things, while being undercover as normal, non-awesome-monster-fighting teenagers.

This is going to be one of the best days of Max’s life, she can already tell.

 

 

**\--------------Steve (August) --------------**

Contrary to what Dustin seems to think sometimes, Steve does have friends besides a group of middle schoolers. For example, he hangs out with his ex-girlfriend, and her current boyfriend, and …

… and …

… okay, so his social life has kind of gone to shit lately. That’s fine. Steve’s bounced back from worse. He is bouncing back. He’s got an apprenticeship with the town electrician lined up to start next week, and his parents have mostly come around to the whole “putting off college” thing. Sort of.

(Mostly, they don’t talk about it.)

Steve also isn’t talking to his parents about where he’s going on Thursday. He tells them he’s going out, and he’ll be at a friend’s house for dinner.

“I’m grilling some steaks,” his dad says, wheedling.

Steve sighs, because _steak_ , man … but he’s got places to be. “Maybe I’ll eat light, come home with some room left, huh?”

“What a compliment,” his dad mutters.

“I’ll be home every night for the rest of the week,” he promises.

Steve leaves around noon and drives over to the Wheelers’ house. There’s a suitcase and a duffle bag already sitting out on the pavement by the car. Mike answers the door, looking dour. The usually neat front hall is full of more bags, stacks of books, and Nancy’s puffy floral duvet. He can hear Nancy’s raised voice somewhere in the depths of the house.

“Nancy’s upstairs with our parents. I’m watching Holly,” Mike informs him without saying hello.

“Sounds thrilling, you know, maybe I’ll go hang out with Jonathan …” Steve makes as if he’s about to turn around and leave.

“They’re on their way over already,” Mike cuts him off. “Will radioed.”

Steve steps inside, and is immediately distracted by the sounds of voices arguing upstairs. “I’m still gonna … uh … wait down here with you and Holly.”

“You want to take over now?” Mike asks, the opportunistic little shit. “We’re playing Sorry.”

Steve rolls his eyes, but he follows Mike into the living room and sits down on the clear patch of floor by the couch where the board game is set up.

After a few minutes, the arguing upstairs stops — or at least, it quiets down enough that they can’t hear it in the living room — and a moment later, Nancy comes running down the stairs. Her footsteps are heavy with the weight of the laundry basket in her arms. She stops dead in the doorway to the living room and stares at Steve.

He waves. “Hey Nance.”

Nancy shakes herself and smiles brightly at him. “You came!” She sounds winded. “Thank god. I’ll say hi later, I’ve got to,” — and she hauls herself and her laundry out the front door without finishing the sentence.

“Steve,” Holly says, “Steve. Steve.”

“Holly Holly Holly,” he mimics, without thinking. “What’s up?”

“Your turn.”

They make it through most of the game before the Byers’ car pulls into the driveway, and then Steve and Mike get sucked into the swirl of frantic movement, too. For the next half hour, Steve helps Nancy and Jonathan and Mike cram as much as they can from the hall into one oversized suitcase, then brings the rest back upstairs. He says hello to everyone at least twice and ends up carrying Holly around, crying from overexcitement, until he can find Mrs. Wheeler and hand her over to be calmed down.

When all is said and done, there’s room for Nancy and her parents in one car, and the Byers and Mike in the other. Steve is here to watch Holly while they’re gone, for which his fee is $5 plus whatever change is lying around the kitchen. Then there’s the fussing and going over of logistics by Mrs. Byers and Mrs. Wheeler, at which point Steve is dying to shower and eat a couple burgers and not hear anyone shouting for a good long while.

“Where’s Nancy?” Mrs. Wheeler asks the world at large, looking around.

“Jonathan?” asks Mrs. Byers.

“I’ll go find them,” Steve says, and escapes to the side yard to catch his breath.

To his surprise, he does actually find Nancy and Jonathan in the bushes by the side of the house: not engaged in any last-minute making out, thank fuck, just sitting face-to-face and talking in low voices. They fall silent and look up when Steve’s shadow falls over them. They are perfectly in sync, and it makes Steve’s breath catch to see them bent over together, framed by the bushes like they were made to contain the two of them.

“Your, uh. Your mom says it’s time to go,” he stammers.

Nancy and Jonathan give each other matching tired glances. Nancy holds out her hands to Steve, who catches them and pulls her to her feet. Jonathan scrambles upright less elegantly.

“All right then,” says Nancy. It has an air of finality. It says, _this is it. This is goodbye._

Everyone else is around the corner, waiting for them, but they’re out of sight for now. Steve shoves his hands in his pockets. He’d had a sort-of speech prepared about how much he appreciates them and how cool they are, because he’d told himself that he can’t just dispense advice about communication to Dustin and not do the same thing. Not cool.

Now that he’s in front of them, it seems really stupid. Steve fixes his gaze on Nancy’s shoulder, a good neutral zone. “Good luck with the airport. Hope they don’t ship your luggage to Florida or something by accident.”

“Thanks,” says Jonathan.

“It’s been … uh. I just want to say I like …” No good. “You two are good together. I …” Stupid, stupid. Nancy crosses her arms. Steve puts a hand on each of their shoulders and swallows the lump in his throat because it feels, stupidly, like he’s saying goodbye to his future, to any hope he had of keeping them both in his life for good. “It’s not gonna be the same without you guys around. You’re … you’re really something.”

Jonathan’s face flickers between amusement and pleasure, shoulders hunched. He reaches out to hug Steve, doesn’t even bother going for a handshake first. Weirdo. Steve hugs him tightly despite the sticky August heat. Nancy comes up from the side and slides her arms around them both. The shape of her body is still familiar. Steve holds onto them for a moment longer than he should. He needs to remember this for the next four months: the weight of their bodies against his, Jonathan solid and comfortable, Nancy wiry.

His hand catches on Jon’s shoulder as he pulls back. Steve looks between the two of them. Nancy purses her lips, glances at Jonathan, and leans in to kiss Steve firmly on the cheek.

“Don’t miss me too much,” she says.

Steve stares at her. “Yeah, uh. Who are you, again?” he asks — hand still on her arm — eliciting a small snort.

Jonathan makes a strained noise in the back of his throat. Steve turns his head in time to catch a face full of sandy hair. Lips press against his temple, and then Jonathan steps away.

“Dude,” says Steve, stunned. Jonathan looks anywhere but at him.

“We’ll send you postcards,” Jonathan mumbles.

“We’ll see you for Christmas!” Nancy says loudly. She takes Jonathan’s arm and turns away.

“You can’t — did your boyfriend just — dammit, Jon!” Steve yells after them, throwing up his hands.

Nancy looks back over her shoulder at him and smiles as if she and Jonathan aren’t continually turning his entire world inside out. Steve presses his fingers to either side of his face for a moment, bites down a grin, and gives them a moment to get ahead while he pulls himself together.

 

 

**\--------------Mike (September) --------------**

Nancy calls from a pay phone the next morning to let them know that she and Jonathan landed all right, and she’s moved into her dorm, more or less.

Mike is out of the house when she calls that day, so his parents insist on him talking to her when she calls the following week. She tells him about her dorm room, and her new roommate, and the subway, and Jonathan’s roommate, none of which Mike particularly cares about.

“How’s Jane?” Nancy asks, when she’s finally done talking about college.

Mike looks around the corner. His dad is in the living room reading the newspaper. His mom is downstairs doing laundry. “Good,” he says. “We met her at the arcade when me and Lucas met up with Max, and then we all walked around town.”

“And no one’s said anything?”

“She’s Chief Hopper’s secret daughter. Mom still thinks it’s ‘scandalous’.” Mike rolls his eyes. “Nothing about what happened in seventh grade yet.”

Nancy sighs down the line. “Don’t move too fast towards … being friends, whatever. I know you’re not technically dating, but don’t — it’ll draw even more attention to her.”

“Ew. Gross.” He makes a face even though she can’t see it.

“I mean it, Mike,” Nancy says, laughing.

“We’re being really careful, I promise. She’s only ‘friends’ with Max right now. We don’t get to start really hanging out until school starts.” Mike and Jane had both argued about that, but Hopper didn’t let them change his mind.

“Good,” says Nancy.

Mike wants to tell her that he’s afraid of Jane going to school. He’s afraid of her making new friends, and realizing that he and the rest of the party aren’t that cool after all. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time when she needed them. She’s going to be friends with girly girls like her, and she’s going to stop caring about being Mike’s weird best friend.

He can’t tell Nancy. Even though she knows about him and El and Will. They don’t talk about things like that.

“Earth to Mike,” Nancy says, sing-song.

“I hate waiting,” he says instead.

“Waiting is the worst,” she agrees. “When I was waiting to hear back from colleges, it was awful.”

Mike scowls. “That’s different. You were obviously going to get into NYU. You went undercover and told the entire country about the lab, there’s no way they were going to say no.” (He thought she should’ve sent the newspaper articles that mentioned her and Jonathan in with her applications. Nancy had nixed the idea, and Lucas had talked him out of mailing them in on his own.)

“How is that different? You know what’s going to happen, too. You’ll go to school, you’ll pretend to become friends with Jane, she’ll join your nerd crew, and then you get to bring her over for dinner and have Mom and Dad ask pleasantly unpleasant questions about her family.” Nancy pauses. “On second thought, maybe don’t have her over for dinner unless I’m home.”

“What if she makes other friends? What if she doesn’t want to join the party anymore?”

“Then you’ll have to learn to share. I don’t like having to talk to Jonathan’s weird roommate for fifteen minutes about Star Wars every time I visit, but that’s just how it is now. Things change, and Jonathan likes him.”

Mike snorts. “He’s weird because he likes Star Wars?”

“No, he’s weird because he smokes way too much grass and has a giant poster of Princess Leia in a bikini over his bed.”

“Gross,” Mike says, with feeling. The bikini was … something, all right, but he’d rather spend a week in the Upside Down than advertise his opinion with _posters_.

“Exactly. But it’s never going to be different, so there you go. You do what you can.”

Mike hesitates, glances into the living room to double-check on their parents. “Even if it’s not — ugh, forget it.” He catches himself twisting the cord around his fingers, over and over again, and extracts himself as quickly as possible.

There’s a small sound over the phone that could be a laugh, could just be background noise. “You’re always going to be important to Jane, no matter how many new people she meets. You and your friends were the first. And … well, you’ll have Will. He’ll be there, too.”

Mike’s face goes hot, embarrassed and pleased all at once to hear his sister acknowledge it. “Yeah, you’re right. It’ll be okay.” He studies the lines left on his left hand by the telephone cord, rubbing his fingers against each other so he doesn’t think too hard about what he wants to say next. “I think you and Jonathan will stay important, too,” he blurts out. “To each other. Um.”

“Thanks, Mike. I’m, uh … thanks. I hope so too,” says Nancy.

“I’m gonna give the phone to Holly now,” Mike says.

“Bye, Mike,” says Nancy. She’s definitely laughing at him now. Mike feels better than he did before they started talking, anyway, so he smiles and makes a farting noise into the receiver before he puts it down to go locate his other sister.

 

 

**\--------------Jane (October) --------------**

Jane can go to other people’s houses now. She has been to Brenda’s house after school. They explored the attic of Brenda’s house, which has a lot of furniture in it. The walls made Jane sneeze. Brenda has a dog, which they played with outside until it was time for Jane to go home. Jane is exhausted afterwards from talking so much, and thinking about what to say all the time, but it’s a good exhausted.

Even though she can visit other people, Will’s house is still her favorite. Will and Joyce are familiar. She doesn’t need to speak at all when she is there, unless they ask her a question.

She goes there after school with Will and Mike. Will looks in the little box on a pole at the end of the driveway. He pulls out an envelope, smiles, and does a little hop.

“What’d you get?” Mike asks.

Will turns the envelope around so they can see the writing. It’s handwriting in cursive, which Jane is still slow to read. Mike doesn’t read it aloud, so she does it herself. “Will Byers,” she reads.

“That’s the ‘to’ part of the address. This, up here, tells you where it comes from.” Will points to the even tinier writing in the top left corner.

Jane squints. “Jonathan Byers one nine eight nine.” Will’s name and Jonathan’s name on different places on a piece of folded paper. “What is it?” she asks.

“Oh!” Will makes his ‘didn’t know that Jane needs to have something explained’ face. All of her friends have their own version of this expression, but Will’s is the happiest. “It’s a letter. Jonathan sent me a letter from college.” He bounces in place once. He takes the letter and two more letters from the box and runs towards the house.

“How does a letter get from New York to Hawkins?” Jane asks Mike.

Mike’s explanation is complicated. Jane doesn’t understand. When she tells him so, his cheeks turn pink. “I’m probably not explaining it right, anyway. I don’t really understand it either. It’s not something you need to understand. Just trust me, it works.”

Jane has the beginning of an idea. “It goes everywhere?” she asks.

“Except for the jungle and Antarctica. Places where no one lives,” Mike explains.

“Chicago?” Jane asks.

Mike meets her eyes and smiles wide. Jane can tell that he understands what she’s thinking. It makes her feel safe. “Oh, yeah. You can definitely send letters to Chicago,” he says.

~~*~~*~~

When Joyce comes home at 7:10 they are all on the couch. Mike is reading their History homework out loud. Jane has her chin on his shoulder. She follows his finger along the words as he reads them. It helps her with reading. It’s also just nice to be close to him. Will leans against Mike’s other side. His eyes are closed but he isn’t asleep. Jane reaches across Mike to poke his forehead, and Will scrunches up his face and swats her hand away before she gets there. Jane still thinks he might be a little special like her. He always knows where she is.

There is the sound the key makes in the front door. Will pushes himself away from Mike a little. “Jonathan sent a letter!” he says as soon as Joyce is inside.

“That’s great! What did it say?”

“I don’t know yet. I wanted to open it together,” Will says.

This seems to make Joyce happy. “We’ll do that right away. Hi Mike, Jane. How was school?”

“Okay, I guess,” says Mike.

“I did good in math. Ms. O’Connell said,” Jane tells her.

Joyce smiles at her. “That’s great, sweetheart!”

Joyce and Will open the letter from Jonathan and read it together. Then Will tells them about it. Joyce goes into the kitchen. Jane follows her.

“How do I write a letter to _my_ sister?” she asks Joyce.

~~*~~*~~

Joyce tells her what an address is. They talk about how to write one. Joyce tells her how to find one, if she looks for Kali.

Hopper helps her set up her TV and blindfold in her new bedroom. He tells her what signs to look for so that she can find an address.

It takes a long time and a lot of bloody noses before Jane finds anything helpful. She sees Kali eating, Kali driving. She sees Kali running away. She can’t seem to catch her sister staying still.

Will gets another letter from Jonathan. It makes Jane hungry, but not for food. She doesn’t understand it.

The next week, Hopper hands her a postcard when she comes home from school. “This came in the mail for you,” he says. “It’s from Nancy.”

Jane’s heart beats fast. There is her new name, _Jane Hopper_ , with her new address underneath it. It is Nancy’s writing, the same writing that corrected her homework so she would be ready to go to school. Nancy’s handwriting is clear and easy to read.

_Dear Jane,_

_I’m sorry it took so long to write to you! I’ve been really busy. College is different from high school. Instead of a little bit of homework every day, I have a lot of homework once a week. New York City is also really different. I love it. It’s so big that you can spend hours in the same spot and never see the same people twice. And there are so many types of people here!_

_You can write me back at the address in the corner, if you want. Don’t worry if you don’t. Mike says you’re busy making new friends. I’m happy for you. Jonathan and I will see you in December!_

_Love,  
Nancy_

Jane reads the postcard again. She traces the letters of her own name where they were pressed into the paper by Nancy’s pen.

She runs for the radio in her room. “Mike, it’s Jane! Over.”

“Mike to Jane, over.”

“Nancy sent me a letter!” she says.

“Cool! She didn’t send me anything. I guess she likes you better than me. Over.”

“Bad lie,” says Jane. She smiles. There is a warm sparking feeling in her chest.

~~*~~*~~

Jane was going to go to Brenda’s house today after school, but Brenda is sick, so she goes home instead. She has a snack first. Then she sits in front of the TV static with her eyes shut yet again. She searches for Kali, and she finds her, and she watches.

And when Hopper comes home, she shoves the sheet of numbers and words in his face. “Is this an address?” she asks.

Hopper takes the paper. He rubs his chin. His eyes crinkle up at the corners.

“You know what? I think we can work with that,” he says.

~~*~~*~~

_Sister,_

_I miss you. I’m sorry we aren’t together. My friend’s mama Joyce taught me how to write a letter so I can write one for you._

_I am stronger because of you. I saved my friends. I killed the monster. Thank you. I don’t need to use my power now. I can use it for good things. I don’t hurt anyone._

_I visit Mama and Aunt Becky every fourteen days now. Mama remembers you. She is still stuck. I want you to help her see us. I can find her but I can’t make her see me. Can you make her see?_

_I go to school now with my friends. I have new friends at school. I live with Hop. We pretend to everyone that he is my father. He is a good person. We do family things with Joyce and my friend Will. We went to a County Fair with Aunt Becky. There were five of us there as a family. Mike came too. He is my best friend._

_I miss you. This is the phone number for Hop’s house. I am home from school when the clock says 4:00. When I am with friends I am home when the clock says 7:00. Please call me._

_Love,_

_Jane_

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact that no one asked for: this fic was originally called "Sibling Relationships and Emotional Labor: the Steve Harrington Experience" before it spiraled wildly outwards like a fucking tentacle monster. Sorry, Steve.
> 
> (There will probably be one more fic in this series, but it's currently on rotation with two other large-ish fanfics and a novel, so we shall see.)


End file.
